Attention! For reasons beyond our control, the entrance to the SARP premises is temporarily closed. Guests visiting the gallery are kindly asked to make a phone call +48228276243

we are sorry for inconvenience

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Paweł Książek, Plates

Paweł Książek’s Plates is a series of works which allude to the illustrative-cum-informational plates used in encyclopaedias, dictionaries and the natural history textbooks that became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as incontrovertible compendiums of knowledge. They are intended to bring out surprising and revealing connections not only between individual events, works of art and the biographies of artists, filmmakers and musicians, but also in a wider aspect, between, scholarship, biology, philosophy and anthropology and, at the formal level, between the shapes, colours, and lines of sketches and scores.

Based on facts drawn from those works, all the episodic stories in Plates fall into cohesive narratives, while the numbering need not always organised from first to last. There is neither chronology here nor a chain of cause and effect. At the formal level, grounded in montage, and at the semantic level, rooted in the exploration of episodic events, they point to an open-ended practice of creating a sequence of alternative interpretations in the sphere of cultural history, where every phenomenon and every concept has a relationship, often hidden. Because the plates do not constitute a closed formula, they can be developed in any direction with no real end.

The problems broached by the Plates series are focused on a great many diverse matters from which we need to single out the primary questions of the artist’s role as a historiographer, an art historian and a (post)scholar. Can a detective-like and factual stance in a scholar-artist analysing a work of art by asking questions and carrying out individual, exploratory searches for connections between paintings and scholarly texts, have an influence on the history of art and, at the same time, on new and refreshing perceptions of artistic phenomena rendered commonplace in that history? Can the schematisation of scholarly works be broken and a new concept for scholarship indicated? Can an art historian base their studies on interpretations formulated by artists? Can an art historian themself improvise ? Can art, in the end, give rise to changes in the field of art history itself?

The exhibition is composed of 25 drawings from the Plates series, and it is accompanied by an artbook, designed by the artists, in limited edition.

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From February 5, 2021, the Foksal Gallery is open for the visitors again

New opening hours: Monday – Wednesday, Friday 12 – 5 pm, Thursday 12 – 7 pm. Free admission.

The archival documantation and the book’s collection of the Foksal Gallery remain unavailable until further notice.

Rules for visitors of the Foksal Gallery during the pandemic

We have adopted a few simple rules that will make your visit to our gallery safe:

• Please, comply with the obligation to wear masks or scarves covering the mouth and nose in the gallery.
• Due to the small space of the gallery, we limited the number of visitors to the exhibition at the same time to two people. Please keep a distance of at least two meters apart. In both cases, the exception is people who live together on a daily basis.
• Please disinfect your hands with disinfectant liquid available at the entrance to the gallery.
• Please do not touch exhibits, multimedia and other devices activated by touch.
• If you notice disturbing symptoms or your well-being indicates that they may occur in the near future – please postpone the visit to the gallery.