Finissage of the doctoral exhibition | XI 2025

On November 11, the finissage of the doctoral exhibition “The Birth of Colors” took place at the Orangery of the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace in Wilanów. The event included a guided tour of the exhibition.

The first part of the exhibition was conceived as a site-specific intervention — an immersion in the space of the Museum of the Earth of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (14 Sept–28 Dec 2023), filled with exhibits.

In this context, the museum exhibits became a natural extension of the exhibition. The energy contained in stones, rocks, and minerals, as well as their color spectrum, were directly connected to my work. It is from minerals that the first pigments were obtained — echoes of the oldest human traces left on prehistoric cave walls. In collaboration with the Museum, I shaped the exhibition environment by selecting exhibits in such a way that the whole became interwoven and mutually resonant.

The structure of the museum, its history, and its collections naturally evoked the archetype of the cave. In myths and rituals, the cave is a space of silence and concentration, but also of confrontation with what is ambiguous and hidden. It is within the cave that transformation takes place. For me, it was a time of descending “into the interior of the earth” — a journey inward.

In this way, the cave became a point of reference: both as an archive of the memory of beginnings — a primordial architectural form of shelter, a symbolic space and cultural archetype — and as a place where art, color, and cosmology were born from the earliest times.

The transition from the Museum of the Earth to the Orangery of Wilanów Palace, where the second part of “The Birth of Colors” took place (27 Oct–11 Nov 2025), is understood as a continuation of a process of transformation: from interior to exterior, from the weight of stone matter to the lightness of light, air, and open space.

In the Orangery, a daily ritual of sunlight unfolds — always different. It is a place that honors painting. Each work, as well as the entire cycle, could fully exist in color within this symphony of light.

The colors intertwined with music — an integral part of the exhibition composed by Joanna Halszka Sokołowska. The paintings, arranged in a straight line facing the light, were exposed to the full diurnal cycle of the sun. In this way, a cosmological process — the movement of the sun, the cyclical rhythm of day and night — became embedded in the structure of the exhibition.

The White Branicki Pavilion and Wilanów Palace were not incidental. I perceive them as important milestones on my path, offering space for transformation through confrontation with the history of places and their material heritage.

The cave and the hill — both physical and symbolic entities — became the medium of this relationship, a site of birth, death, and rebirth: a cycle that continues uninterrupted at the level of the cell and in the cosmic dimension, which I am part of every day, at the intersection of past, present, and future, matter, energy, memory, and perception.

Both the Museum of the Earth and the Orangery form a continuum of experience. This symbolic passage from cave to hill transforms both spaces into contemporary equivalents of the ancient mousaion — a “place of the Muses,” where humans experienced their connection with Nature and the Universe.

According to the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace in Wilanów, the exhibition in the Orangery was visited by over 5,200 people.