Exhibitions & Events

Artists: Zofia Artymowska, Mirosław Bałka, Zdzisław Beksiński, Urszula Broll, Tomasz Ciecierski, Anna Cyronek-Kalinowska, Andrzej Dłużniewski, Wojciech Fangor, Stefan Gierowski, Władysław Hasior, Anna Huskowska-Młynarska, Jerzy Kałucki, Koji Kamoji, Tadeusz Kantor, Paweł Kowalewski, Dorota Kozieradzka, Janina Kraupe-Świderska, Jadwiga Maziarska, Wiesław Michalak, Andrzej Pawłowski, Barbara Pniewska, Agnieszka Polska, Józef Robakowski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Antoni Starczewski, Henryk Stażewski, Władysław Strzemiński, Tomasz Tatarczyk, Jerzy Tchórzewski, Franciszka Themerson, Teresa Tyszkiewcz, Ryszard Winiarski, Teresa Żarnower

curator: Ania Muszyńska 
curatorial team:  Magdalena Marczak-Cerońska, Kama Kieremkampt 

 

Exhibition LIGHT. PRACTICES OF RESILIENCE is a story about the ways in which light – both physical and metaphorical – shapes our perception, emotions, and inner strength. This fundamental arché – a source of life and energy, of truth and understanding – guides us through the exhibition, inviting reflection on where we seek inner fortitude and how we cultivate resilience. It reminds us that humanity has always been able to adapt to changing circumstances: to seek light even in darkness, to find meaning, to create new forms of life and art. Building resilience is a daily practice that enables us to endure and to move forward. The works on display explore the presence of light in painting as a tool for constructing composition, tone, and character, but also as a symbol of hope, perseverance, and transformation.

The exhibition takes its inspiration from Jerzy Tchórzewski’s 1956 painting Man and Light. Created shortly after the Second World War, during the post-Stalinist “thaw”, the work carries the dimension of a metaphor for rebirth – artistic as well as existential. The exploding star that appears within it becomes a sign of hope and of renewed creative energy. Tchórzewski is considered one of the most compelling individual voices in Polish art of the second half of the twentieth century. His painting radiates drama and expression – illuminated fires, pulsing flames, sparking lightning and trembling, electric lines tear across the canvas, granting his works a spectacular presence. These dynamic and luminous qualities secured his place in art history as an artist who could reconcile the experience of destruction with a vision of spiritual and creative renewal.
As art historian Mieczysław Porębski wrote of his work:
“The light created by Jerzy Tchórzewski differs from all the lights to which our perception has grown accustomed and which have been sanctioned in the images we have encountered. It is an infracerebral light. It does not illuminate real objects, nor does it submit to the ordinary laws of chromatic harmony whose source is the sun. Glowing along the edges of forms that obstinately dwell in the subconscious, running in phosphorescent bands across their surfaces, isolating and framing them, it becomes the measure of tension.”
Running parallel to this is the exhibition’s second thread: the diverse practices of resilience developed by artists in response to personal and historical experiences. One such practice is the act of enchanting the world – a subtle gesture found in the work of Janina Kraupe-Świderska and Urszula Broll, in which imagination and spirituality become tools for transcending the everyday. Resilience also emerges through physical activity, through exercises probing the boundaries of the body and its endurance, as seen in the work of Dorota Kozieradzka. Other artists turn to meditation and the spiritual dimension, discovering within them spaces of quietude and strength – as does Koji Kamoji.
Some confront the very material of art itself: Teresa Tyszkiewicz, demanding above all of herself, drove thousands of pins into the surface of her works, transforming the gesture into both an act of concentration and a test of perseverance. Barbara Pniewska, working with the challenging and seldom-chosen medium of metalwork, created compositions that served as metaphors of strength and as protective armour. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s, including after her emigration to the United States, her oeuvre entered significant collections and today – viewed in this exhibition – stands as a testament to unique artistic exploration. Pniewska was able to transform material associated with industrial, austere production into forms organic, corporeal, and sensuous, yet slightly ominous, as if drawn from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In her hands, metal becomes both a surreal metaphor and an expression of strength, resilience, and creative courage.
No exhibition on light could overlook the classics of geometric abstraction – a movement that reveals its very essence through luminosity. Here, colour and form, subjected to strict compression, generate extraordinary energy through luminous breaks, reflections, and vibrations. In this context, the early, somewhat austere yet intensely coloured compositions of Wojciech Fangor resonate with particular clarity. Their simple, near-emblematic forms glow with vivid, pulsating colour, as if attempting to grasp the phenomenon of emanation. Beside them appears a work by Jerzy Kałucki, constructed within the unfailing order of geometry, its severe and radical black transformed, through meticulously conceived proportions, into a kind of luminous architecture.
A gentle, softly muted tension of light permeates the intimate compositions of Anna Huskowska-Młynarska. Her monochromatic visions, seemingly ascetic, hide internal systems of luminance, as though light were a substance that does not break the surface but smoulders beneath the skin, beneath the canvas, continually negotiating its presence.
On the border of abstraction and conceptualism we encounter the domains of Ryszard Winiarski, who employed mirrors that, as he wrote, lend his compositions an additional dimension. They reflect not only light, but also the viewer, turning the work into a space of play between rule and chance, presence and disappearance.
Without light, there is no memory – this seems to be the message of Franciszka Themerson. From the whiteness of her paintings emerge human silhouettes, processions of figures glimmering like the shadows of bygone communities. Filled with fragile, arresting silence, her works become a testament to a time that no longer exists yet still insists on being remembered. Themerson emigrated to England in the 1930s; during the Second World War her closest family perished in Treblinka. Her post-war works, passing through a memory steeped in darkness, construct brightness – a luminous testimony to what has been lost but continues to resonate.
A powerful note within the exhibition is struck by Władysław Hasior’s banners – Banner Full of Brilliance and Banner of Blue Hope. These are emblems of faith in the human condition, in boundless imagination, in the possibility of transcending constraints. Hasior, a singular voice of a generation marked by war, understood that those who survived the inferno were entrusted with a priceless gift. With courage and sometimes provocative sharpness, he juxtaposed objects, images, and metaphors to create compositions that continue to inspire as manifestos of uncompromising creative freedom.
In a different register, Agnieszka Polska offers a spiritual, tender, almost sentimental meditation on our world in her film What the Sun Has Seen, its title taken from a poem by Maria Konopnicka. Sequences of earthly landscapes observed from the vantage point of the sun allow us to distance ourselves from everyday fears, anxieties, and desires. It is a stoic attempt to describe reality while pointing to the supreme purpose of life: to do good, even when enacted in the shadow of chaos. Polska’s film thus becomes a meditation on the condition of the contemporary world, in which light illuminates what is truly essential.

An exhibition devoted to light could not omit the two great masters for whom it became not only a tool but the very ontological foundation of art. Light – the precondition of seeing and therefore of the existence of all visual arts – is treated here not as metaphor, but as the ground without which the eye remains blind and the image inert. This mode of thinking resonates most powerfully in Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Vision, regarded as a fundamental treatise on the nature of perception. For this reason, the exhibition presents his works situated at the intersection of two key concepts: the rigorous, almost ascetic unism, and the series of afterimages in which light is captured as a purely physiological experience, a record of sensation, an echo of looking suspended in time and memory.
For Strzemiński, however, light is not only sensation – it is space, a kind of matrix in which the image comes into being. This idea was continued in the 1950s by Stefan Gierowski. Before becoming one of the most important explorers of colour and light in Polish abstract painting, he spent years searching for his own language. Ultimately, it was Strzemiński’s thought that opened before him a new territory – a cosmic space understood not as landscape but as phenomenon, as emanation of energy, as the tension between darkness and illumination. His early monochromatic series from the late 1950s, restrained yet filled with inner dynamism, are today recognised as among his most significant achievements. Zbigniew Herbert openly admired them, seeing in these works a near-metaphysical visualisation of infinity – an attempt to articulate the cosmos in the language of light. Gierowski, analysing and contemplating Strzemiński’s path, opened his own: one in which light becomes matter, idea, and the very space that generates the image – perhaps even a world that becomes visible only through the painting.

To conclude the narrative shaped by the works of more than thirty artists, let us return to the words of Jerzy Tchórzewski:
“I have never practised art of mere occasion, yet neither have I treated it as a field isolated from its social and artistic context. By nature, I am no social activist, no campaigner, but my life from the earliest years unfolded in such a way that I was always, in some sense, involved (...). Artists are not sprinters – art is no hundred-metre dash but a long-distance run. And I hope that those who make art out of inner necessity – the authentic ones – will recognise the dangers and choose the more difficult, more ambitious path.”
His words resonate here as the credo of the entire exhibition – a reminder that the light of which we speak is not only the substance of seeing but also a symbol of artistic attitude: a readiness to engage, the courage to speak in one’s own voice, and the will to share an energy that strengthens. It is light as an act of responsibility – the gesture of an artist who does not turn away from reality but helps us bear it.

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At the same time, the exhibition marks a meeting of two institutions united by years of collaboration and mutual respect. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the Museum of Art in Łódź for its generous loans and for the enduring partnership and shared thinking on the role of art in the public sphere. We believe that cultivating dialogue between public and private institutions is essential to shaping a responsible cultural environment – both intellectually and organisationally – and that it contributes to strengthening the presence of Polish art, especially post-war art, in contemporary debates at home and abroad, and in the awareness of audiences engaged in our joint endeavours.

 

LIGHT. PRACTICES OF RESILIENCE
27.12.2025 - 31.05.2026 

curator: Ania Muszyńska 
curatorial team: Magdalena Marczak-Cerońska, Kama Kieremkampt 

Exhibition open daily | 10:00–18:00
On Wednesdays, the exhibition is open from 10:00–20:00
Free admission.

Starak Family Foundation | Spectra Art Space
Bobrowiecka 6 | Warsaw