Superstructure by Krzysztof Franaszek – Exhibition Opening

The Kosciuszko Foundation invites you to the opening of Superstructure, a multimedia exhibition by acclaimed visual artist and KF Scholar (2024-2025) Krzysztof Franaszek.

The exhibition Superstructure is a multi-part art project reflecting on the fragility of both material and symbolic structures in an era of rapid cultural change. The title term “superstructure,” borrowed from the language of social theory and architecture, refers to everything built above a foundation – in a physical, civilizational, cultural, and spiritual sense. The exhibition explores how such structures are formed, how they transform, collide, and eventually fall apart when faced with time, migration, globalization, and entropy.

The project consists of three interconnected parts: a video installation, sculptural objects, and a series of sanguine drawings. Each element explores the idea of the “superstructure” on a different formal and conceptual level.

The exhibition is held in the historic interiors of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York, which adds a meaningful context. The space, rich with the spirit of the past and memories of Polish-American heritage and tradition, contrasts with the modern, experimental form of the exhibition. The dialogue between contemporary art and historical space becomes a key part of the project – a meeting of past and present, permanence and impermanence, museum-like presentation and ephemeral installation.

Video Installation

This seven-minute film is a visual poem without a classic narrative. Built as a collage of images and sounds, it touches on themes of identity, passing, and the ongoing need to create in a world that is constantly reshaping itself. The camera captures primal landscapes: earth, rocks, primitive structures and homes. Traces of erosion, fading, and slow decay are visible.

Against this backdrop, different cultures come together: songs of Native Americans, Christian symbols, elements of Polish presence in the U.S. – shops, churches, a local Greenpoint resident recalling how the neighborhood used to look. Industrial scenes from New York intertwine with views of its cemeteries – places of final belonging. This is a film about entropy, both physical and symbolic – about how temporary, improvised structures inevitably head toward disintegration. But it’s also a story about their spiritual endurance, about the traces they leave behind.

Sculptures

The three sculptures represent physical versions of “superstructures” based on a strong contrast in form. Their central elements refer to the craft of the Acoma Pueblo people, especially the so-called “seed jars” – vessels shaped like seeds, symbols of fertility and continuity. Here, however, they take on futuristic, abstract forms: discs resembling eyes, flying saucers, spiritual vehicles.

Made from an undefined, shiny material, they rest on unstable, twisted steel legs – welded together from scrap metal found in New York’s industrial areas. These “legs” seem to tremble, to balance, defying gravity. They create tension between what is ideal and abstract, and what is damaged, found, random. Structure as conflict: between idea and matter, between what is spiritual and what is industrial and abandoned.

Drawings

The third part of the exhibition is a series of 10 sanguine drawings, forming the artist’s visual journal. These are sketches, mental notes, and metaphorical maps of today’s superstructures. Each drawing captures a single form: a boulder balancing on a point, tangled wires on a utility pole, a ruined gravestone, a restaurant on the edge of being forgotten. The drawings balance between documentation and abstraction. They are like notes from a present-day archaeologist trying to capture forms just before they disappear. The red hue of the sanguine gives them a sense of physicality, of flesh and matter, but also melancholy.

Superstructure is a story about a world in motion, in a state of transition. It’s an exploration of the fragile boundaries between the material and the symbolic, the traditional and the contemporary, the spiritual and the industrial. The exhibition creates a space where the viewer is invited to reflect on their own structures – those that shape them, and those that are inevitably falling apart

Krzysztof Franaszek was born in 1981 in Lublin, Poland, and currently lives and works in Warsaw. He is a visual artist working in sculpture, multimedia installations, and drawing. Franaszek graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2006, received his postdoctoral degree in fine arts in 2021, and was appointed university professor in 2025. Since 2006, he has been a faculty member at his alma mater.

His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Gallery of the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf, Germany (2024); Galeria Biała in Lublin (2023); the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (2021); AV(17) Gallery in Vilnius (2021); Casa Matei Gallery in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2021); the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2013); and Galeria Studio in Warsaw (2009). He has also participated in many group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including at Galeria Studio in Warsaw (2024); the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2022); the New Museum in New York (2008); the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh (2018); BWA Gallery in Lublin (2009); the 9th International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Saint Petersburg (2009); and the Kunst Museum – Staatliche Akademie in Stuttgart (2005).

In addition to gallery work, he has realized numerous collaborative and site-specific projects in public spaces across Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Lithuania.

In 2025, Franaszek completed a research-based art project at the invitation of Parsons/The New School in New York. He was a scholarship recipient at the studio of Christian Jankowski at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart (2005), as well as of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2009, 2018, 2020). In 2024, he was awarded the Kościuszko Foundation Prize. His works are held in the collections of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, PKO Bank Polski, and numerous private collections in Poland and abroad.

Franaszek’s artistic practice centers on exploring the complex interactions between humans and their environments—particularly the relationship between human nature and artificially generated surroundings. His work frequently investigates the tensions that arise from the collision of creative impulse with the destructive forces of time and nature. His recent research delves into the primal nature of creation itself, both in physical space and in the realm of virtual experience.

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