Art Warsaw Villa Róż: The Architecture of a Parallel Art Market Centre

In Warsaw last week, an abandoned 19th-century villa was the host of a new edition of Art Warsaw.

For several years, the fair’s concept has been to present Central and Eastern European contemporary art in unconventional spaces: moving away from the familiar white cube towards architecture with a strong biography and a distinct interior character. 

The strategy works perfectly, while admission to the event is free. As a result, Art Warsaw attracts around 10,000 visitors annually. 

If the two previous editions took place at Villa Gawrońskich – a former Yugoslav embassy with its aristocratic decorative character and obvious Instagram aesthetics – this year’s venue produces a completely different effect. In the building of the former British embassy, the feeling of the Cold War does not leave you from floor to floor. Part of the villa’s architecture retains the logic of diplomatic reception spaces: ceremonial interiors and remnants of palace-like splendour. But further on, the space changes rapidly: labyrinths of former office rooms, metal shutters, reinforced rooms, a small armoury, and rooms that the organisers describe as former interrogation spaces. Add to this more than fifty galleries, dense hanging of works, crowds of visitors, and narrow corridors – and the atmosphere of a polished boutique fair at times turns into a claustrophobic trap, where visitors hurriedly search for an exit from the world of contemporary art.

This inevitably prompts reflection not only on the artworks on view, but also on the political dimensions of what is taking place. It is evident that, following Poland’s political ambitions, an event such as Art Warsaw captures Warsaw at a moment when the city is trying to establish a more visible (and possibly central) role within the Central and Eastern European artistic and cultural field.

Art Warsaw positions itself as a platform for artistic scenes that have long remained outside the dominant Western European market. The list of participants indeed reflects a geography that differs from the usual fair circuit: Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, alongside Western players from Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Brussels, Stockholm, and London such as Hollybush Gardens and Galerie Nordenhake. After two years of collaboration with NADA, the project continues independently: “These were two very good years. I think both we and NADA learned a lot from each other, but now we have decided to continue developing the event under its own brand, Art Warsaw”, says co-founder Joanna Witek-Lipka. This transition appears as an attempt not only to integrate into the international art market, but also to strengthen its own regional infrastructure.

Frida Orupabo, Milk, 2022, collage: pigment print on acid-free cotton paper, mounting tape, split pins, mounted on aluminium, 62 x 128 cm Photo: Gerhard Kassner © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake

The arguments for such ambitions in Warsaw are strong. A high concentration of private galleries, new institutions, a growing network of collections and foundations, a fair ecosystem, and support from the city all allow us to speak no longer of an “emerging scene”, but rather of a mature artistic infrastructure. The city co-finances the project, which, according to the organisers, has made it possible to expand the public programme – including tours, performances, meetings, and professional events. The fair has not yet received support from the Ministry of Culture, although Witek-Lipka does not hide the political dimension of what is happening: “Of course, this is a form of soft power and cultural policy”.

According to Witek-Lipka, international interest in Poland has grown in recent years. Seven to eight years ago, she recalls, while working on Warsaw Gallery Weekend, it was extremely difficult to convince international guests to include Warsaw in their packed calendars. Today the situation looks different: competition with the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and other major events remains, but more and more international professional groups now write directly to the organisers requesting visits.

An important part of Art Warsaw’s strategy is relationship-building within the regional ecosystem. The organisers aim not only to integrate Poland into the global art calendar, but also to introduce visiting gallerists, collectors, and journalists to the local scene: through meetings, networks of contacts, and visits to institutions, private foundations, and collections. The presence of major international galleries, according to Witek-Lipka, shows that Warsaw is becoming a place worth investing professional time and energy in.

The question, however, is how this market actually functions in practice.

According to conversations with galleries, the commercial dynamics of the fair appear significantly less international than its list of participants. Polish galleries representing Polish artists mostly report sales, reservations, or tangible results already in the first days of the fair. Among international participants, the picture is less clear: some speak primarily about professional contacts, institutional interest, and potential museum acquisitions, others about reservations whose outcome remains uncertain.

The distribution of commercial weight within the fair itself is also telling. The two most evidently expensive booths belonged to international galleries – Galerie Nordenhake and Hollybush Gardens. The former presented works by Polish artists Mirosław Bałka and Leon Tarasewicz, as well as the Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo, while Hollybush Gardens showed works by Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson. However, according to conversations with some participants, Western collectors hardly appeared among actual buyers. The main collector base of the fair still appears predominantly local and Polish. And, quite predictably, Polish collectors largely buy Polish art.

Organisers, however, describe the situation in more complex terms. According to Witek-Lipka, returning galleries are gradually building stable relationships with collectors, while Polish buyers are purchasing not only local but also international art. At the same time, despite the overall slowdown of the global art market, Poland is seeing a rise in interest from new collectors – both from a younger generation and from people previously not engaged in the market.

Despite the politically charged space of the former embassy and the regional context, works directly engaging with themes of war, political violence or post-socialist trauma are relatively few – from the fragmented presence of Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan and works by Romanian artist Ciprian Mureșan to a sculptural object in the form of a head of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko in the booth of the Belgian gallery KIN. Perhaps this is an attempt to present Central and Eastern Europe not only as a perpetual geopolitical exception.

And yet it is precisely here that the limitations of this new infrastructure become visible. If the fair speaks of voices that have long remained outside the field of visibility of the Western art market, then who exactly gains access to this new visibility? Since 2020, Poland has become a new home for a large community of Belarusian artists who relocated to the country following waves of political repression. However, their presence at the fair is barely visible. This year, two small works by Belarusian-Polish artist Ala Savashevich are presented by the Milan-based gallery eastcontemporary, although even here she operates primarily within the Polish art scene.

Ala Savashevich, Toy memory 3, 2018, felt, metal stand, 40 × 20 × 16 cm. Courtesy the artist and eastcontemporary

When asked about the possibility of alternative forms of participation – for example, for artists without gallery representation, given that there are no Belarusian commercial galleries in Europe – the organisers respond quite directly: Art Warsaw is a commercial format working exclusively through the gallery model. According to Witek-Lipka, the focus of the project is primarily on inviting regional galleries, while decisions regarding artists are made by the galleries themselves. “I think this is the moment when Belarusian artists will become increasingly visible in Polish and international galleries, and I hope this will gradually be reflected in events such as ours”.

Perhaps this response best describes the logic of the event. Despite discussions of underrepresented artistic scenes and new regional centres, access to the fair economy still passes through existing mechanisms of market legitimation – even if the fair itself aesthetically distances itself from the white cube and prefers the language of architecture that has lost its original function, and a certain degree of informality.

It seems that Art Warsaw Villa Róż is not so much shifting the global art market centre eastwards as it is participating in the construction of a parallel regional centre around Warsaw. Whether this project will manage to translate the international geography of participants into a truly international economy of buyers remains an open question. But what is important is that right now the fair offers a rare opportunity to observe the market not as a finished success story, but as a process and space in which cultural ambitions, urban positioning, local capital and infrastructure of access are still negotiating with one another.