Galeria Studio, founded in the 1970s alongside Teatr Studio by Józef Szajna, emerges from the legacy of visual theatre and radical formal experimentation. Szajna—a painter, set designer, and theatre director and survivor of Auschwitz—developed a vision of “total art” shaped by his wartime experience, seeking to dissolve the boundaries between artistic disciplines and to integrate visual, performative, and spatial practices into a single expressive field. For him, the separation between mediums was not only limiting but conceptually inadequate in the aftermath of historical catastrophe.
In its forthcoming programme, the gallery focuses on the potential of visual art within a theatrical condition: its entanglement with scenography, staging, and costume, and the forms that emerge from such intersections. Revisiting Szajna’s legacy today, the programme foregrounds contemporary artistic practices that operate across media and formats, where the erosion of disciplinary boundaries becomes a method for rethinking how art is produced and experienced.
The institution is situated in the Palace of Culture and Science (1952–1955), a stalinist monumental skyscraper in the centre of rapidly transforming Warsaw. The building stands on the layered ground of the former Warsaw Ghetto, placing the gallery within a dense historical and symbolic field where postwar reconstruction, ideological architecture, memory, and urban change remain in continuous tension.
