Foksal Gallery Foundation

The Foundation is a non-profit making organisation set up in 1997 to address the need for international representation of an emerging generation of young Polish artists. It started life as a nomadic, parasitic organisation, working in and around the city of Warsaw, but has recently moved into an exhibition space on the third floor of an empty office block. The new space offers a strategically view on the much derided communist-era Palace of Culture, an iconic building in the Warsaw cityscape.
The three curators worked previously for the Foksal Gallery, and the new Foundation maintains a close relationship with the historic gallery. But the Foundation’s vision is quite independent from that of the older gallery, and it represents a quite different group of artists. The creation of a not-for-profit structure has enabled the new organisation to raise funds for particular projects directly from government, as well as from overseas cultural agencies, and so to bypass the bureaucratic mechanism of city arts funding. The Foksal Gallery Foundation has thus been able to realise ambitious projects by internationally recognised artists such as Santiago Serra, Douglas Gordon, as well as continuing to promote the generation of young Polish artists who have emerged in the late 90s.
Project are often executed outside the gallery space. A commitment to the local art context is also seen in the curators’ continuing efforts to review the careers of an earlier generation of radical Foksal artists working in the late fifties and sixties. The Foundation has remade installations and entire exhibitions as an important way of asserting and recapturing the history of experimental art at the Foksal Gallery. They have also presented a revisionist version of this history in lectures, exhibitions and publications.