Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2026: 10 Exhibitions Still Open Across the City
Warsaw's annual gallery weekend completed its 16th edition across September 18 to 20, 2026, spreading 60 exhibitions through foundations, museums, commercial galleries, and independent spaces around the city. The scale is considerable, yet the event retains an exploratory quality: established institutions sit alongside newer initiatives, and the programming crosses neighborhood boundaries rather than clustering in a single district. Observer was first to report the full roundup; what follows draws on their coverage to highlight what remains open for visitors arriving now.
The shows and where to find them
Gunia Nowik Gallery, Bracka 20A hosts Sana Shahmuradova Tanska's second solo exhibition, running through November 7. Born in Odesa in 1996, Tanska draws on Ukrainian mythology to address war, inherited trauma, and political reality. Two 2026 canvases, Mute Swans and Expulsion (Archangel Michael, Adam, and Eve), after Bosch, are singled out as particularly affecting.
bliss gallery, Szpitalna 5/7, open through October 24, presents Magdalena Lazar's multimedia project rooted in Upper Silesian mining landscapes. Photography, cast glass, textiles, and metal combine in an installation that incorporates found 1980s decorative glassware. The gallery itself only opened in spring 2025, making it one of the city's newest venues.
MONOPOL, Marszałkowska 34/50, shows Martyna Pinkowska's paintings of anonymous women in domestic interiors through November 14. Paper collages by Teresa Pągowska from the early 1990s accompany the display.
TURNUS, Emilii Plater 31, operating out of a repurposed school building since April, hosts Tomasz Tofilski's Mangle through October 25. The curatorial collective behind the space pairs exhibitions with a café and social programming.
Galeria Szaber, parked outside TURNUS as a truck, staged WGWROOOOOOOM during the opening weekend. That show closes September 26, so time is short.
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Górskiego 1A, runs Paulina Ołowska's THREE COLOURS through November 7. The painter enters into loose dialogue with Krzysztof Kieślowski's film trilogy, weaving together modernist design references, late-socialist visual culture, and personal biography.
TBA, Wilcza 62, shows Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko's 11 watercolors through October 31. The works invert conventional imagery of hell, placing violence above ground and staging a resurrection of the murdered as an act of justice.
Lisowski, Chmielna 8, presents archival material by the late Sławomir Belina through October 31. Belina shaped the aesthetic of Polish lifestyle magazines including Max and Machina in the early 2000s; the gallery frames the show as an effort to recover a chapter of Polish queer cultural history.
IMPORT EXPORT, Aleja Szucha 16/7, hosts American artist Laurie Simmons through October 31. Her Autofiction series uses AI tools trained on her photographic archive, then reworked by hand. A companion presentation of monochromatic paintings by Cathy Josefowitz has been extended in a more compact form.
Stereo, Tamka 37/1, closes Gizela Mickiewicz's The Shortest Distance on October 31. Her sculptures combine direct casts from rocks and trees with impressions of arms and fingertips, working in glass and bronze.
A note on WGW+
This edition also featured WGW+, a strand introduced the previous year that brings artist-led projects, temporary formats, and nonprofit organizations into the main selection. The truck show and the school-based venue both reflect this expanded model, which Warsaw Gallery Weekend director Joanna Witek-Lipka has described as a response to alternative structures emerging outside conventional gallery frameworks.
Why it matters for hosts
The exhibition calendar runs well into November, with several shows closing October 31. Independent accommodation operators in central Warsaw have a concrete window to position their properties as bases for art-focused visitors. Sharing a simple map of the venues, most of which cluster within walking distance of each other in the city center, gives guests a practical reason to extend their stay beyond the opening weekend and to plan repeat visits across the autumn.
Details were first reported by Nicolas Vamvouklis for Observer.
First reported by observer.com.