WGW 2025: Inner Sun | Urszula Broll, Anna Sztwiertnia

About the event

INNER SUN Urszula Broll | Anna Sztwiertnia 📅 September 19 – October 25, 2025 Exhibition opening as part of the WGW+ section 🔗 https://warsawgalleryweekend.pl/wgw-plus?wgw=1 📅 September 19–21, 2025 🕒 Opening hours: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM On a cloudless night over Warsaw, no more than two hundred stars are visible. Far from the glow of cities, the sky reveals nearly six thousand. Daily life is similar: in the thicket of stimuli, it is easy to miss what might bring solace. Excess does not mean abundance. On the contrary, it constantly demands attention. The exhibition was conceived as an exercise in focus: tuning the senses to the sound of water in the "Hydrofornia", the damp scent of plants, the pulsing glow of a lamp, and finally the half-light from which the works emerge. The show juxtaposes two distinct strategies for coping with an overload of signals. The “inner sun” of the title refers to a self-regulating energy, understood as the ability to filter out noise and find calm. The practices of Urszula Broll and Anna Sztwiertnia, though rooted in different circumstances, the silence of a mountain studio and the intensity of the city, share a search for tools that help maintain proportion in a world of distractions. Urszula Broll began painting watercolours in the 1960s, at first treating them as a private refuge. They were created in stolen moments between everyday duties, on paper, and only occasionally on canvas. Over time, the works assumed geometric forms and became instruments of quieting. In parallel, the artist grew interested in Jungian psychology and later in Eastern philosophies. The painting of mandalas, repeated mantra-like, merged creative and spiritual practice. Forms she initially treated as her own order revealed themselves to be part of a centuries-old meditative tradition. In the 1970s, in her Katowice studio on Piastowska Street, the first Zen community in Poland began to take shape. In the 1980s, she left Katowice to live and work in the Karkonosze mountains. This was a conscious withdrawal in which art and meditation fused into a single rhythm of life and work. There, she created works rooted in geometry and repetition, steeped in references to Buddhism and Eastern practices. A recurring motif was the circle, a sign of energy, light, and the inner source. These “suns,” present in Broll’s watercolours for decades, carried not only a formal but also an existential dimension. They became a daily exercise in attentiveness, a way of restoring inner order. Anna Sztwiertnia lives in the city and works with its material. Noise, hum, industrial architecture, and streetlights are transformed into installations that expose what usually irritates the senses below perception and lend it a soothing character. Hydrofornia makes visible the hidden infrastructure of water supply, turning it into an almost therapeutic device and reminding us of the healing power of water. A similar role is played by vessels filled with aquatic plants, inspired by the research of the design group CENTRALA into urban water gardening. Once common in Warsaw’s public spaces, these “water vessels” act as small reservoirs of moisture, supporting the local microclimate and introducing an element of relief. In the installation "HPS 1800K", the artist employs six old high-pressure sodium lamps emitting a warm orange-yellow glow. Their radiance contrasts with the city’s cold lighting. Although technical standards are gradually altering their colour, the city’s perpetual brightness continues to disrupt the circadian rhythms of humans and animals alike. A walk beneath a starry sky or the chance to experience true darkness while falling asleep has become a rare privilege, replaced by an unceasing glow. Other works, such as "Magnetic Field" or "Labyrinthitis", refer to invisible structures that organise perception: the lines of the magnetic field or the labyrinth that regulates spatial orientation. Sztwiertnia not only alludes to these models formally but creates works that operate similarly, ordering chaos and modulating stimuli. The exhibition "Inner Sun" asks whether it is possible to act under conditions of overload. Both artists propose their own strategies: one through silence and intimate ritual, the other through reorganising daily matter and interventions that domesticate the city’s intensity. In the face of external clamour, the inner sun, whether defined as artistic practice or as other everyday forms of attentiveness, illuminates the path and helps to find calm even against the backdrop of communist greyness or today’s concrete jungle. Curator: Katarzyna Piskorz