Warsaw – a city up for the taking
In this story about Warsaw, two threads intertwine: the painterly narrative of the artist Krzysztof Kokoryn and his works devoted to the capital, and the thirty‑year history of the CMS Cameron McKenna law firm’s presence in Warsaw — an anniversary that is, after all, a perfect occasion for memories. In the paintings and in the recollections, we find the history of the city from the 1990s to today, a record of an extraordinarily fascinating period of social, economic, visual and cultural transformation.
Warsaw of the 1990s was ugly, cold, chaotic and unwelcoming. It scared visitors away with the underground passages at the Central Station and the concrete desert around the Palace of Culture and Science. At the same time, it embraced everyone. “It embraced me — a complete outsider,” says Kokoryn, who was born and raised in Szczytno in the Mazury region and came to the capital to study at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The Warsaw of the transformation era was a land up for grabs, so expats, representatives of Western companies, law firms and advertising agencies flocked here. In January 1995, American lawyer Andrew Kozłowski opened the Polish office of the international law firm McKenna and Co., now CMS Cameron McKenna. Today, from the perspective of the firm’s headquarters on the forty‑second floor of the Varso Tower, overlooking the entire city, it is hard to believe that the first office, in a tenement house at 30 Kopernika Street, consisted of four small rooms with windows facing an air shaft. The building, owned by the Agricultural Cooperative Union “Samopomoc Chłopska”, hid a true treasure in its basement — a subsidised canteen. The cooperative members, evidently with access to the best products, fed their own people well. Compared to most milk bars serving dreadful lunches, this place was paradise. Both savvy students and employees of nearby companies ate there. Kokoryn would drop by for lunch at Kopernika 30 even after finishing his studies, all the more so because he lived just around the corner, on Tamka Street.
Warsaw needs constant change — newer and bigger. A good example of this process is the FIM Tower (now Central Tower) at the corner of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Chałubińskiego Street, a postmodern skyscraper erected in the early 1990s. The growing CMS Cameron McKenna office moved there from Kopernika. The modernist tenement that had stood on this site since 1911 was demolished in 1973 to make way for a temporary tram track during the construction of the Central Station. After the tracks were removed, a plot “up for the taking” appeared, and an Italian investor built a high‑rise inspired by American skyscrapers of the 1980s. The salmon‑coloured façade elements stirred emotions among Varsovians and sparked debates about aesthetics. A dozen years later, the building lost its original appearance during modernisation — the salmon panels were replaced with dark blue ones. That’s Warsaw for you! But in Kokoryn’s painting, the FIM Tower retains its postmodern character and its salmon detail.
Kokoryn calls Warsaw’s skyscrapers “pencils”. He likes adding them to the ever‑changing skyline, he likes looking at Warsaw from above. He has long painted the city from a bird’s‑eye view. It began with mountaineering, which gave him the qualifications to work at heights. Hanging on a rope on the façade of a skyscraper or a heating plant chimney, the young painter looked at the city from above. He still loves that shift in perspective. From above he painted the Warsaw Financial Center, the third headquarters of CMS Cameron McKenna. Built in the late 1990s, the building was considered one of the most modern skyscrapers in Central Europe. Designed by an American architectural studio, referencing the 333 Wacker Drive office building in Chicago and constructed according to American standards, it had no equal in Warsaw for a long time. Kokoryn, however, does not like either the form of the WFC — a prism broken by an arch at the top — or the grid of granite façade elements. But in the painting, he gives it a chance.
Thirty years ago, such paintings would not have been possible. But over these three decades, Warsaw has become more beautiful, gentler, greener; it has invited people for walks along the boulevards, for bonfires on the Vistula’s banks, for dancing on barges, for orange juice, for sushi, for jogging, cycling and yoga, until it finally gained the character of a European metropolis. The Varso Tower has surpassed the Palace of Culture.
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In November 2025, the CMS Cameron McKenna headquarters in the Varso Tower hosted Krzysztof Kokoryn’s exhibition “Warsaw”. The forty‑second floor, a prestigious interior with a magnificent viewing terrace, the panorama of the city at one’s feet — an impressive culmination of the firm’s thirty years of activity, and a moment of joy and satisfaction for its employees. The meeting with the artist and the paintings of Warsaw sparked a wave of memories and stories about the city and its people.
