Monthly Archive: August 2026

From Evidence to Experience: Revisiting the Documentation of Zbigniew Warpechowski’s and Raša Todosijević’s Performances with Fish

In the mid-1970s, Polish artist Zbigniew Warpechowski (b. 1938) and Serbian artist Raša Todosijević (1945–2024)—independently created works that, according to the photographic documentation, are strikingly similar. Warpechowski and Todosijević were artistic contemporaries within the East-Central European performance and conceptual art network, but they had no documented long-term close personal or collaborative partnership. Their respective works—Dialogue with Fish (1973) by Warpechowski and Drinking Water: Inversion, Imitation, and Contrast (1974) by Todosijević—were produced in close temporal proximity, within a comparable socio-political context of late state socialism. The two artists ultimately pursued divergent scenarios, though their works were documented in an analogous … Read more

Lunar Landing: Cosmic Themes and Feminism in the Works of Ester Krumbachová, Olja Ivanjicki, Kiki Kogelnik, and Evelyne Axell

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The first artificial satellite remained in orbit for only three months, yet its brief trajectory set in motion nearly two decades of technological and ideological rivalry between the USSR and the United States. The 1960s saw this competition intensify, culminating in NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20, 1969. Television broadcasts, illustrated magazines, newspapers, and science fiction films circulated images of rockets, astronauts, and cosmic landscapes, creating a shared visual language that crossed geopolitical boundaries and appeared in both art and experimental costume design

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Security in Ruins. Review of the 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

The 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, May 9 – November 22, 2026. 

This edition of the Biennale has been beset by dissent and protest, most notably worker strikes and the resignation of the jury protesting the participation of Russia and Israel. The Biennale organizers responded to these protests heavy handedly with reinforced policing throughout the city and by taking the extraordinary measure of devolving the selection of the winners of the main prize to the general Biennale public, in what can only be read as a crudely populist gesture. Artists and cultural workers have initiated … Read more

Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues, 1956, oil, canvas; 140 × 200 cm, National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

Suspension in Time: Transatlantic Explorations of “Waiting”

Two paintings with the same title. Both executed in the second half of the 1950s, but on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and within two different ideological systems. They are visually akin—not through overt mimicry, but by a repetition of forms and an atmosphere of claustrophobia. Can a chance juxtaposition of Andrzej Wróblewski’s Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues (Poczekalnia I, Kolejka trwa, 1956) and George Tooker’s Waiting Room (1959) disclose something important or inspiring?

Wróblewski’s painting is one of the most famous works of postwar Polish art and belongs to the collection of the National … Read more

Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues, 1956, oil, canvas; 140 × 200 cm, National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

Special Issue: Next To Each Other: Exercises in Horizontal Art History

This special issue derives from the traveling seminar Linking Art Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the Present, a series of five week-long seminars that took place across Prague, Budapest, Berlin, New York, and Giverny from 2022 to 2024.(The seminar series was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Getty Foundation.) Organized by Beáta Hock, Tomáš Pospiszyl, and John J. Curley, the seminars united graduate students, junior scholars, and senior researchers, this seminar raised a series of questions about the connections—both tangible moments of influence and more speculative instances of … Read more