WHO NEEDS THIS ART? Francisek Kowolowski /THE IMPOSSIBLE COLLECTION
THE IMPOSSIBLE COLLECTION
WHO NEEDS THIS ART? Francisek Kowolowski
19 September 2026 at 5.00 pm
This is the latest edition of a project we launched in 2025. The project consists of a series of four meetings to be held at ARTLab Wyspa on Sobieszewska Island, where the foundation runs an open studio and artist residency.
Each session will be centred around a single work from the Wyspa Progress Foundation’s collection, exhibited within the ArtLab space, which will serve as a starting point for a broader exploration of the artist in question and contemporary art.
The Wyspa Progress Foundation has been collecting artists’ works since 1995; its first spectacular exhibition, ‘Contemporary Art Collection for the 1000th Anniversary of Gdańsk’, took place in 1997. Since then, the collection has grown thanks to donations from artists, without public funding and outside the system
of regional contemporary art collections. This is yet another dimension of its ‘impossibility’. The collection functions through engagement with the viewer – ideally one who is aware and curious about new experiences; to achieve this effect, the viewer must be provided with competent and accessible information about the artwork. The Wyspa Progress Foundation is organising a series of events – encounters with a single artwork and its artist – at the collection’s home, ART Lab Wyspa.
The project will comprise four meetings in 2026.
This time, we invite you to a meeting with Franciszek Kowolowski.
A project by František Kowolowski (1967) ‘Area Code’ operates in a visual-ideological context through the temporary form (so-called ‘temporary decay’) of imperfect objects within an already designed spatial scheme. These are sources of information in socio-critical, social, artistic and personal or intimate relationships occurring within spatial systems and their codes. A code is a formula by which information is transformed into another representation for the purpose of its transmission or recording.
Information – technology – ideas – the entropy of the grand narrative of modernity, Tatlin’s Tower, exploration, analysis, accumulation, rearrangement, touching the unreal – oscillates within the illusion of hyperreality, a mediated model of knowledge without a real object of exploration, without ontological necessity.
Personal histories can also be viewed as a system. This represents an effort to critically assess information ‘from within’, as the mission is already unclear today. The intimacy of the objects in the installation creates tension. It may be an ‘archaeology’ of found objects or those still functional. The clustering of realities within a spatial arrangement speaks of a possible mutual exchange of information and its potential changes – entropy. An object is a potential source of ideas – it is an endless interplay of its own disappearance and function.
František Kowolowski (born 1967) studied in the Painting Studio of Jan Tarasin and Ryszard Winiarski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He specialises in painting, performance, installation, video and photography. In his work, he also draws on his experiences behind the scenes of artistic activities. He explores transience, artistic recycling, linking objects to specific places, and manipulating their meaning within a given context. He is primarily associated with the Ostrava scene, which is characterised by a distinctive form of artistic subversion and irony. He explores the possibilities of the artist’s own physical engagement. In addition to his own practice, he is also heavily involved in curatorial activities. He has worked at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Young Artists’ Gallery and the G99 Gallery in Brno. He heads the Painting II studio at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava, and teaches as an external lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. He is also the author of numerous international curatorial projects, including at the MNAC in Bucharest and the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok.
