Greetings from Warsaw
The heroine of this exhibition is Warsaw. A real Warsaw, though one that feels almost like a fairy tale — suspended between reportage and a colourful dream, between reality and painterly imagination.
The pretext for telling the story of the capital over the past three decades is a series of Warsaw‑themed works by Krzysztof Kokoryn. In the paintings and in the artist’s memories, we find the history of the city from the 1990s to today.
The Warsaw of the 1990s was ugly, cold, unwelcoming. Difficult, chaotic. It scared visitors away with the underground passages at the Central Station, with the concrete desert around the Palace of Culture and Science — nicknamed “Pekin” by locals, from the abbreviation PKiN, and called by the poet Władysław Broniewski “the nightmare dream of a drunken confectioner.” And yet it embraced everyone. “It embraced me — a complete outsider,” says Kokoryn, who was born and raised in Szczytno in the Mazury region.
Mazury, the former Upper Prussia, are worth recalling, because that is where the future painter’s sensitivity to landscape and architecture took shape. His family home stood in a solid pre‑war German building for civil servants; it had harmonious proportions, thick walls, a huge two‑storey tiled roof with deep eaves under which swarms of swifts arrived every May. “When I heard their squeaking, I knew spring had begun,” Kokoryn recalls.
He painted his first childhood landscape in that very house. He imitated his father, an amateur artist, who was painting the view from the window — the lake, and behind it a small house and a tenement. The father carefully reproduced every detail, and the son followed him; today, in his cityscapes, he also renders even the tiniest detail. That view no longer exists — the little house is gone, replaced by a discount supermarket. But the changes had begun earlier: the charming old German town was disappearing, swallowed by blocks of prefabricated concrete. “I always felt a bit out of place there; throughout my childhood I lived with the sense that my stay in that town was temporary,” says Kokoryn. In 1988 he left for Warsaw to study painting.
Soon after, the political transformation began — a gust of freedom. A huge bazaar sprang up under the Palace of Culture, on Plac Defilad — the favourite shopping spot of Varsovians. On folding army beds lay goods once available only in Pewex stores: alcohol and cigarettes, cassette tapes, Italian sweaters, Turkish jeans, Japanese Walkmans straight from Germany.
Varsovians were learning new, exotic flavours, adapted to Polish tastes by Vietnamese street cooks. The bars were Yugoslav plastic kiosks, model K67. Plac Konstytucji earned the nickname “Little Hanoi”, where — as food critic Maciej Nowak recalled — “in the early 1990s, in dozens of cramped Yugoslav plastic booths, exhausted pioneers of the corporate order devoured duck from a steaming platter, spring rolls or sweet‑and‑sour pork while standing.”
In the mid‑1990s, the first metro stations opened.
Expats, representatives of Western companies, law firms and advertising agencies flocked to Warsaw. The capital was an ocean of opportunity, a land up for the taking. Businessmen with Centertel mobile phones pressed to their ears became an increasingly common sight. Newcomers taught locals the business dress code.
Kokoryn’s Warsaw memories are tied to specific addresses. One such place was the tenement at 30 Kopernika Street. It belonged to the Agricultural Cooperative Union “Samopomoc Chłopska” and 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.
Tamka was love at first sight. The painter was looking for a flat with a studio, but because he was then deeply involved in producing a series of animated films for television, the search was slow. Producers kept sending him addresses, but viewing apartments interrupted his work. He chose the flat on Tamka quickly, even though the communist‑era block looked far from inviting. He took the lift up, stepped into a completely ruined interior, looked out the window — and stayed. He was captivated by the street winding like a river. And although he has long since moved away from both Tamka and Warsaw, the view of his beloved street — with the Ostrogski Castle, the perspective toward the Palace of Culture, and the ever‑growing forest of skyscrapers — keeps returning in his work.
To paint a picture, a painter needs a reason. Sentiment, memory — that’s a good reason: this is where he walked to the academy, here for lunch, there for parties or jazz.
One of the first works in the Warsaw series contains exactly such a sentiment — the Jazz Club Akwarium on Emilii Plater Street. Admission cost next to nothing, and at the weekly jam sessions one could hear outstanding musicians. Akwarium closed in 2000; the pavilion was demolished, and the InterContinental skyscraper rose in its place. The commercial pavilions on Marszałkowska, which also appear in Kokoryn’s paintings, are gone as well. Even the Ruch kiosk is now just a memory — a painterly document — because the last PRASA‑KSIĄŻKA‑RUCH point in Warsaw closed last year. The one painted by Kokoryn stood on Świętokrzyska Street.
Warsaw is a city of change, a city that races against itself. Big is replaced by bigger, new by newer. This eternal construction site was described by poets and writers such as Białoszewski, Tyrmand, Konwicki. The old gives way to the new, and over the past thirty years this process has accelerated dramatically. “Warsaw doesn’t know how to grow old,” wrote essayist Marcin Wicha. “It wants everything to be always new, shiny and wrapped in protective foil. It wants the air to smell of damp cement and paint.” A city under construction. All the more reason to collect images of the past and memories, layering them like successive strata on the map of the city.
A good example of rapid change is the FIM Tower (now Central Tower) at the corner of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Chałubińskiego Street, a postmodern skyscraper built in the early 1990s. The modernist tenement that had stood there 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.
The painter 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. 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.
He always tries to understand the motif — the architecture, the street interior — and painting and drawing help him do that. He walks through the city, sits on a low wall or a bench, takes out his sketchbook and paint box, and notes down buildings, situations, moods. He observes closely, and through drawing he better understands what he is looking at, the meaning of a given space or architecture; he notices divisions, proportions. Drawing is better than a photograph — it allows him to feel the atmosphere, to catch the perspective. In this process, the chosen place becomes even closer to him. Krzysztof Kokoryn is a contemporary portraitist and vedutist of the capital. Each work proves his tenderness and attachment to Warsaw.
A city is its people. Kokoryn loves a joyful crowd. He likes people; he likes the world. The city seen through his eyes is a place where reality always favours us, and everyday life is tinged with humour and childlike innocence.
Perhaps thirty years ago such paintings would not have been possible. But over these three decades, Warsaw has grown 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.
Looking at Krzysztof Kokoryn’s Warsaw paintings — and at Warsaw from the terrace on the forty‑second floor of the Varso Tower — one feels compelled to repeat after Julian Tuwim, a Varsovian by choice: “Is it not the strangest and most beautiful city in the world.”
The patron of the publication of Krzysztof Kokoryn’s album Warsaw is the CMS law firm. The firm’s 30th anniversary is a good occasion to recall memories of the capital since the 1990s. The buildings mentioned in the text and portrayed in the paintings — the tenement at 30 Kopernika Street, the FIM Tower, the WFC and the Varso Tower — are the successive headquarters of the firm.
