Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
On 25 October 2024, Natalia Shpytkovska attended the newly opened Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and was delighted to see the artworks of Ukrainian artists in the collection.
The newly opened museum, a new building designed by American architect Thomas Phifer and Partners on Marszałkowska Street, showcases a thoughtfully curated selection of both Polish and international contemporary artworks, designed to highlight Warsaw's transformation into a modern cultural hub.
The debut exhibition highlights contributions from women artists, showcasing works by Polish icons such as Alina Szapocznikow and Magdalena Abakanowicz, alongside global creators like Cecilia Vicuña and Sandra Mujinga. Visitors can see nine large-scale works by female artists that demonstrate their relationship with architecture and space.
The exposition presents the works of Ukrainian artists, namely Kateryna Lysovenko, Zhanna Kadyrova, and Nikita Kadan. The artist Kateryna Lysovenko created a wall painting, especially for the opening of the museum’s new headquarters.
The artwork created by Zhanna Kadyrova “Asphalt” is included in the collection. Kadyrova often brings materials like tiles, bricks, and cement into her work, repurposing them in ways that comment on societal and historical change. For Asphalt, her choice of medium elevates something as mundane as pavement into a thought-provoking statement on transformation and endurance, reflecting Ukraine’s experience with resilience and adaptation amid rapid social and historical shifts.
Nikita Kadan’s motifs of sirens, war ruins and ancient Greek items from Ukrainian museums, looted by the russian army during the occupation are now exposed in one of the halls of the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. Listening to the siren, an air raid alarm, almost every day in Kyiv inspired the artist to depict sirens – mainly as stone sculptures of Greek and Roman origin.
This new space symbolizes Poland’s move towards a more democratic, open cultural landscape, shedding its communist past and fostering an inclusive environment for contemporary discourse.