Jutka

OBJEKT Gallery
Warsaw, 2025

Christmas Installation

JUTKA is a story about the home as an ecosystem of meanings: about what we inherit, what we transform, and how we build our own forms of dwelling. It is about how contemporary design can become a conversation – not only between aesthetics, but between generations.

The Zakopane style – with its carved wood, the rhythm of Podhale patterns, and the weight of handcrafted labor – was one of the first Polish attempts to create its own design language. It proposed a vision of the “total” home: a coherent, lived-in whole in which architecture, furniture, and detail speak with one voice.

At the roots of the Zakopane style lies not only the work of craftsmen, but above all the temperament of Stanisław Witkiewicz who sought in the architecture of Podhale a vision of the future and who could perceive in wood and ornament something more than decoration. For him, Podhale was a living laboratory of form – a place where tensions, deformations, and exaggerated proportions emerge. In his thinking, the wooden cottage became a dramatic structure, and the carved pattern – a record of emotion.

It is from this heritage that we depart at JUTKA. The shelf and table by Krześlarz – made of solid, varnished, and carved wood in the 1970s by the carpenter-sculptor Wojciechowski – and the iconic armchair designed by Witkiewicz himself are introduced into the gallery space as a living trace of that ambition.

The artists invited to the exhibition work in the spirit of a home understood as a cohesive whole, but differently: they do not reconstruct; instead, they draw from tradition what is still alive – technique, ritual, gesture. In their objects, folklore becomes a catalyst for exploration, and craftsmanship – a tool for building a new intimacy. Agnieszka Owsiany’s scenography, woven from straw like a contemporary jutka or podłaźniczka, completes this gesture. The straw, raw, intricately bound decoration returns here as a sign of everyday ritual, an object-metaphor that links the home with ceremony.

Artists: Jan Ankiersztajn, Paweł Grunert, Aleksandra Hyz, Daniel Lemanowski, Paweł Olszczyński, Aleksander Oniszh, Agnieszka Owsiany, Monika Patuszyńska, Karolina Pawłowska, Basia Pruszyńska, Roser, Filomena Smoła, Studio Speculo, THER, Aleksandra Zawistowska

Scenography: Aleksandra Krasny, Agnieszka Owsiany

Curator: Aleksandra Krasny