Art talk & Preview followed by reception:
Wednesday, September 10, 2025, 5:00 - 9:00 PM
In the hidden museal archives you might find early interviews with artists who understood that materiality itself could be a form of resistance. This sensibility, the belief that physical form carries its own intelligence, its own capacity for critique, animates the extraordinary gathering of four Polish artists at Nguyen Wahed Gallery in fall 2025. What unfolds across the gallery's space is not merely an exhibition but a kind of material philosophy in action, a proposition about how objects think and how thinking becomes object. There's something decidedly unorthodox about encountering Marlena Kudlicka's powder-coated steel in the same breath as Magdalena Abakanowicz's haunting bodies.
Nguyen Wahed Gallery, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, presents these four Polish artists - Kudlicka, Barlik, Abakanowicz, and Kurant (on loan from private collection) - create a dialogue that feels less like a national grouping and more like a conspiracy of forms against the smooth surfaces of our contemporary moment.
For Barlik, this exhibition marks a crucial point in an ongoing investigation that has moved through some of Poland's most significant institutions. Her "Datament" at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art last year proposed a radical rethinking of data as material, while her contribution to the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, a collaboration with curator Jacek Sosnowski, saw her sculptures enter into dialogue with architectural space itself. The works she brings to New York, fresh from her residency at Art Omi in upstate New York, feel like a continuation and expansion of these institutional conversations. These new works will carry forward the institutional weight of her Polish exhibitions, creating a transatlantic dialogue about how we inhabit and transform space.
What strikes me most forcefully is how these four artists refuse the clean boundaries between digital and physical, conceptual and material. Kudlicka's mathematical precision bleeds into Barlik's architectural interventions. Abakanowicz's brutal physicality finds echo in Kurant's data-driven mineralogy. It's as if they're all working on the same problem from different angles: how to make the invisible visible, how to give weight to weightlessness, how to assert the stubborn fact of material presence in an increasingly dematerialized world.
I'm reminded, standing before Kudlicka's recent works, of something an artist once said about mathematical functions—that for any given 'x' there can be only one 'y'. Kudlicka seems to reject this certainty entirely. These fresh pieces, created specifically for this exhibition, extend her collaborations with engineers and architects into new territory. They occupy space like elegant errors in the system, each powder-coated surface catching light in ways that suggest communication protocols gone beautifully awry. She calls them investigations into "work productivity, efficiency" - but what emerges feels more like a love letter to the gap between intention and outcome.
But it's in the dialogue between generations that this exhibition finds its most compelling frequencies. Abakanowicz's headless figures, products of the 1970s and 80s, carry the weight of Communist-era anonymity, that particular Eastern European experience of being simultaneously hypervisible to the state and invisible as an individual. Positioned near Kurant's "Sentimentite," with its crystallized collective emotions rendered in synthetic minerals, we see a conversation across decades about what it means to give form to the formless pressures of systematic control. She's mining the invisible architectures of digital control, creating objects that feel like artifacts from a future that's already here but which we haven't quite learned to see yet.
The collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute New York for the Symposium programme will add another layer to this conversation, positioning these works not as examples of national identity but as part of a more complex dialogue about how Polish artists navigate and transform international art discourse. It's fitting that Marlena Kudlicka will be in conversation with Izabela Gola curator at the Polish Cultural Institute NY, while Barlik discusses her Venice Pavilion experience with Sosnowski, these talks promise to unpack the networks of collaboration and exchange that make such work possible. The curatorial decision to stage this conversation now, with new works fresh from the studio and residency, in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute NY, feels particularly urgent. As our screens multiply and our physical encounters diminish, these works insist on the irreducibility of spatial experience. The exhibition refuses to resolve into easy synthesis. Instead, it offers something more valuable: a sustained meditation on how we might continue to make meaning through material in an age that seems increasingly hostile to both. In their geometries of resistance, these four artists map possible futures where form itself becomes a kind of freedom.
Program: Art talk & Preview September 10, 2025, 6:00 PM
Anna Barlik in conversation with Jacek Sosnowski, curator of Polish Pavillon, Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023
Marlena Kudlicka in conversation with Izabela Gola, Polish Cultural Institute New York
This exhibition is co-organized and co-produced with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
