Last Updated on October 8, 2024
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw) has announced plans to celebrate the opening of its new home, located in the centre of the city in historic Plac Defilad (Parade Square). Designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, the building will be inaugurated in two phases, in October 2024 and February 2025.
A three-week cultural festival with more than 100 public events will begin on October 25, 2024, providing a preview of the activities and exhibitions the Museum will offer. During this first phase, MSN Warsaw’s galleries will feature large-scale sculptures and installations by Polish and international women artists whose work will be presented in dialogue with the new building. In February 2025, the Museum will unveil its fully installed galleries with the first comprehensive exhibition drawing from its collection of more than 1,000 works of Polish and international art from the 21st and late 20th centuries.
In the new building, the entire ground floor of the Museum will always be open free of charge to the public during hours of operation.
The 213,000-square-foot concrete structure—the first building to be designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners and built in Europe—is MSN Warsaw’s first permanent home since its founding in 2005. Established as a collecting institution focused on art created since 1989, MSN Warsaw has hosted dozens of exhibitions in temporary spaces in Warsaw and across Poland. Now, it will have a dedicated space with approximately 48,911 square feet for long-term and temporary exhibitions, as well as a 150-seat theatre, state-of-the-art conservation studios, a performance auditorium, education spaces, and a ground-floor bookshop and café.
“This project, which is 20 years in the making, gives the Polish capital its first permanent home for international contemporary art,” Joanna Mytkowska, Director of MSN Warsaw, said. “Founded as a roving institution committed to the art of our time, MSN Warsaw now takes on a new role as a centre for conversations animating contemporary art of all kinds. We are immensely proud to be taking this major step with a building that is worthy of the remarkable collection we have assembled, and that advances our efforts to serve as a civic institution with a global reach.”
To mark the building’s completion, the Museum will offer an ambitious series of public performances, talks, concerts, family programmes, film screenings, and other events that run from October 25 through mid-November, highlighted by a newly commissioned video work by Agnieszka Polska that will be projected on the Museum’s façade.
“Our mission with this project was simultaneously to recognize the legacy of Parade Square, to create a new model of architecture for the historic city of Warsaw, and to design a space that can meet the complex needs of art since 1989 as well as those of contemporary Varsovians,” Thomas Phifer, founder of Thomas Phifer and Partners, said. “Envisioned as a vitrine of light, the building is a museum and a new town hall for citizens to join one another as active participants in the cultural renaissance underway in Warsaw.”
MSN Warsaw Building
The opening of MSN Warsaw marks a new era for Parade Square, the largest public square in Europe and a gathering place for Varsovians since the 1950s. Framed by the Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science on one side and an arcade of shops and malls on the other, the museum building anchors the revitalization of the plaza and serves as a center for new art and ideas in the nation’s capital. (The square also will house the future TR Warszawa theatre designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners).
In contrast to the verticality of the Palace of Culture and Science, the MSN Warsaw building is organized horizontally and composed of two rectangular forms. Its distinguishing façade, composed of white, cast-in-place concrete hand-crafted by skilled local craftspeople, expresses the institution’s ethos and offers a lasting and timeless presence.
The façade is punctuated by the building’s horizontal ribbon of windows that offer clerestory light into the second-floor galleries. A continuous arcade serves as a transitional space between the city and the Museum, setting the stage for the experience within.
A monumental, classically inspired double-symmetrical staircase at the heart of the Museum is flooded with natural light, offering a space for social interaction. The openness of the ground floor creates a central meeting point and offers generous views of the city and through the Museum. The center space also organizes the entrances to the main suites of interconnected galleries on the two upper floors. Each suite of galleries on the two main exhibition levels features windowed “city rooms” lined in European ash that offer places for pause and reflection and framed views of the city of Warsaw.
Fixed galleries, ranging in height from 4 meters (13 ft) to 7.5 meters (25 feet), are each a different size and proportion. A system of louvres and scrims modulates natural light and activates the galleries throughout the day. The roof—referred to as the building’s “fifth facade”—offers continuous diffused daylight into the galleries. The galleries feature elegant but durable terrazzo floors.
The ground-level exterior is lined with newly planted honey locust trees that lightly enclose the forum.
Opening Programme: October 25 through Mid-November
In October, to mark the first phase in its opening, the Museum will present the sixteenth edition of WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION, co-curated by the event’s founder, Tomasz Fudala, with Natalia Sielewicz and two guest curators Niels Olsen and Fredi Fischli.
Titled The Museum Between the Palace and the Square, this year’s project examines how architecture shapes institutions, the duties of museums in public life, and MSN Warsaw’s purpose in the nation’s capital and its new home in Parade Square.
While looking to the future, the festival will tell the story of Parade Square over the past decades and address its role in Warsaw’s history. The Museum Between the Palace and the Square also looks back to two previous editions of the event: the inaugural WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION, which looked ahead to a possible home for MSN Warsaw in Parade Square; and the 2017 edition, which focused on the square as it began to undergo redevelopment. The new installation will include collaborations with GTA Exhibitions, the gallery of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
In addition to presenting large-scale works by women artists, the Museum will premiere new works and highlights from its collection, including the debut of a Wojciech Bąkowski sound installation, an all-night screening of “pop” films from the 1990s, and a family programme including workshops and breakfast on Sunday.
The multi-week festival opens October 25 with two performance-focused events. The first, curated by Magda Komornicka, is a survey of Polish choreography of the past decade. Invited artists will premier new works and reinterpret performances staged at previous MSN Warsaw locations to explore the Museum’s architecture through motion and dance. Among the highlights will be a six-hour marathon of performances by young Polish artists. The programme will include works in progress, chamber-scaled solo performances, and performative installations that encourage viewers to focus on how the new building encourages movement.
A second group of performances will be organised by curators from the Kontakt Collection, an independent art foundation based in Vienna that holds art from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. To mark its 20th anniversary, the foundation will present new performances by contemporary artists and restage two of Slovak artist Július Koller’s “anti-happenings,” which are included in its collection of works by more than 150 artists from 20 countries.
Educational initiatives, which have been integral to MSN Warsaw since its founding, will be included in the opening week. Primary Forms, a programme developed over the past three years with the EFC Foundation, will culminate with an exhibition that will bring primary school students from across Poland to the Museum, giving them firsthand experience with contemporary art.
About the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw
Founded in 2005, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw) is a public institution devoted to collecting, presenting, and interpreting international art made since 1989. With broad interests in the visual arts, graphic design, industrial design, architecture, performance, and multimedia art, the Museum holds more than 1,000 works acquired over the past two decades.
Included in the collection are works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alina Szapocznikow, Monika Sosnowska, Cecilia Vicuña, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. MSN Warsaw also collects objects of visual culture, including neon signs, posters, and post-internet art, and holds archives from important Polish post-war art institutions such as the Foksal Gallery and the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio. It also retains more than 1,000 avant-garde films.
About Thomas Phifer and Partners
Since founding Thomas Phifer and Partners in 1997, Thomas Phifer has completed the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, expansions of the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as the United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Brochstein Pavilion in Houston, Texas, and houses across the United States. Projects under construction include the TR Warszawa Theatre in Warsaw.
Mr. Phifer is the recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, the Medal of Honor and President’s Award from the New York Chapter of the AIA, the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and the National Design Award in Architectural Design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. In 2022, he was elected as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
