We are pleased to announce our participation in Miart 2026, one of Europe’s leading modern and contemporary art fairs, taking place from 17 to 19 April in Milan. We will be showing works by Łukasz Stokłosa.
Łukasz Stokłosa (b. 1986) lives and works in Kraków. Stokłosa draws inspiration primarily from
mass culture, film, television series, and the aesthetics of camp. His work focuses on history
and its contemporary interpretations. He devotes particular attention to the painting traditions
of the old masters, whose influence can be seen in his approach to painterly material, as well
as in the composition and textual layers of his works. His paintings are at times rich with
homoeroticism, complex and layered with ambiguity; they evoke the mood of noir cinema:
simultaneously alluring and unsettling, inviting deeper reflection.
For this presentation, painted specifically for the fair, Stokłosa focuses on his most prominent
series: interiors of castles and palaces — spaces that for centuries were sealed from public life,
sheltering the idealised existence of those who inhabited them, yet which have since been
inverted into their opposite: now fully accessible, but hollowed of original meaning, functioning
as simulacra of themselves.
Stokłosa paints only places he has visited in person, working from photographs taken on his
phone — a method that lends the compositions a distinctly contemporary quality that viewers
recognise from their own image-making, held in tension with his baroque-inspired painting style.
He does not transcribe these photographs directly, but subtly alters them: shifting furniture,
adjusting colours, displacing details — making his works symbols of symbols, representations of
representations.
The paintings navigate this double register with deliberate ambiguity. On one hand, they engage
the democratisation of these spaces; on the other, they mourn the loss of original function and
the histories buried behind closed doors and overgrown in formal gardens. They are
simultaneously homage and critique — celebrating the craftsmanship and architectural ambition
of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries while implicating the exploitation and war that funded their
creation. And running through all of it is camp: the sheer performativity of aristocratic life, its
theatricality and self-conscious excess, rendered in paint with the same knowing distance.
Selected solo exhibitions include: False views at Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków (2026), The Shining at
Royal Castle in Warsaw (2026), Once upon a time at Rose Easton, London (2025), Elegies
(2025) and Sol Victus (2024) at the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków, Cries & Whispers at Tureen,
Dallas (2024) and Perihelion at AMITY, New York (2023). He has also been featured in many
group exhibitions, such as I Will Reveal Myself To You Through My Gaze at KRUPA, Wrocław
(2026), Let Me Tell You About Halfdreams at the National Museum in Gdańsk (2025), Let Them
See Us! Image. Attire. Body at Royal Castle in Warsaw (2025), Nostalgia: Seekers of Fading
Stars at MOCAK, Kraków (2025) and The Discomfort of Evening at Zachęta – National Gallery
of Art, Warsaw (2022). His work has been presented at international art fairs, including NADA
Miami (2024) and Vienna Contemporary (2024).
