At the Stefan Gierowski Foundation in Warsaw, Polish abstraction is being placed within a considerably wider geography. Curated by Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu, AETHER COMMONS: Refracted Cosmologies brings the paintings of Stefan Gierowski into conversation with artists including El Anatsui, Esther Mahlangu, Andile Dyalvane, Zizipho Poswa, Modupeola Fadugba, Satch Hoyt, Mona Hatoum, Olafur Eliasson and William Kentridge. The result is less a conventional group exhibition than an argument for understanding abstraction through multiple intellectual and material traditions.
At its centre is Gierowski, one of the major figures of post-war Polish abstraction. Across a career spanning six decades, the artist repeatedly returned to light—not simply as something represented through paint, but as a physical and perceptual phenomenon. His canvases became laboratories for colour, matter, space and the unstable relationship between what the eye encounters and what it believes it sees. AETHER COMMONS takes this unresolved investigation as its starting point.
Rather than establishing Gierowski as the historical source from which the contemporary works proceed, Nwagbogu places his paintings within a network of parallel enquiries. It is an important distinction. The exhibition does not attempt to insert African artists retrospectively into a European history of abstraction; instead, it asks what happens when different systems of knowledge are permitted to occupy the same intellectual space without one becoming the standard against which the others are measured.
The exhibition is organised around three interconnected strands. “Material Alchemy” brings together El Anatsui, Satch Hoyt, Zizipho Poswa, Andile Dyalvane and Mona Hatoum around materials whose encounters with light are inseparable from processes of accumulation, firing, breaking and transformation. “Perceptual Fields,” through Olafur Eliasson, Julian Kyusang Lee, Alessandra Carosi and William Kentridge, considers light as something constructed through perception. Modupeola Fadugba and Esther Mahlangu form “Expanding Light’s Vocabulary,” where geometry, colour and surface become carriers of cultural and cosmological knowledge.
This structure produces some of the exhibition’s most compelling encounters. South African ceramicist Andile Dyalvane’s Ngcip-ngciphu (Almost, almost), 2025, brings fired earth and glass into a precarious relationship between solidity and fragility. Alongside Gierowski, the connection is not one of stylistic resemblance but of transformation: one artist builds through pigment and sustained observation, while the other subjects earth to heat, pressure and time. Both allow matter itself to record the conditions of its making.
A similar shift occurs around Esther Mahlangu. Her geometric language emerges from Ndebele visual traditions rather than the genealogies through which European modernism is usually taught. Here, those forms are not treated as decorative counterpoints to Western abstraction but as a sophisticated visual system in their own right. That positioning matters: it makes cultural transmission, geometry and chromatic intensity part of the exhibition’s broader enquiry into how societies have understood and organised light.
Material transformation continues elsewhere. Fadugba uses fire directly on her surfaces; Hoyt incorporates fragments of stained glass into pigment; Poswa works through monumental ceramic form; while Anatsui’s metal surfaces turn accumulation into shifting fields of reflection. Fire, glass, clay, pigment and metal repeatedly move between physical substance and carriers of memory, perception and knowledge.
That breadth is characteristic of Nwagbogu’s curatorial practice. Founder and director of LagosPhoto Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation, he has long worked across photography and contemporary art while questioning the institutional frameworks through which African practices are encountered internationally. In Warsaw, that perspective produces an exhibition concerned not with replacing one canon with another, but with loosening the hierarchy through which artistic histories have traditionally been organised.
The word “commons” in the exhibition’s title is therefore significant. The Foundation describes it as a shared space in which different traditions of thought can meet without being collapsed into a single interpretation. Light can simultaneously operate as physical energy, perceptual experience, elemental transformation and cultural or cosmological knowledge. No single tradition is asked to provide the definitive explanation.
What emerges is a more expansive proposition for modernism itself. Rather than a history moving outward from a handful of European centres, AETHER COMMONS suggests that artists working across different geographies have long confronted related questions—about matter, perception, colour, spirituality and the limits of representation—through radically different cultural frameworks.
Gierowski remains central, but he is no longer alone. His paintings become one voice within a larger constellation, allowing Nwagbogu to turn an exhibition about light into something more consequential: an examination of how art history changes when different ways of knowing are allowed to illuminate one another.
AETHER COMMONS: Refracted Cosmologies is on view at the Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Plac Jana Henryka Dąbrowskiego 8/11, Warsaw, until 18 October 2026.
