Reframing Modernism
At the Stefan Gierowski Foundation in Warsaw, Azu Nwagbogu places one of Poland’s most significant abstractionists in dialogue with contemporary artists from Africa and beyond, revealing how parallel investigations into light, materiality and perception have unfolded across cultures, often beyond the established narratives of modernism.
Brendon Bell-Roberts
22 July 2026
Why would one of Africa’s foremost curators devote an exhibition to one of Poland’s most celebrated post-war painters?
At first glance, the pairing appears unexpected. Yet AETHER COMMONS: Refracted Cosmologies quickly reveals that the question itself is based on assumptions the exhibition sets out to dismantle. Rather than positioning Stefan Gierowski within a narrowly European history of abstraction, curator Azu Nwagbogu places his work within a broader conversation about light, materiality and perception, one that extends across cultures, geographies and systems of knowledge. The result is neither a retrospective nor a conventional international group exhibition, but a curatorial proposition that challenges where modernism begins, where it unfolds, and who has been permitted to shape its histories.
The invitation itself is significant. That the Stefan Gierowski Foundation entrusted the reinterpretation of one of Poland’s most important painters to Nwagbogu, whose curatorial practice has consistently challenged the geographies through which art history has been written, signals a willingness to move beyond established categories. Throughout his career, he has sought out artistic practices that developed outside the dominant centres of post-war modernism, recognising that important conversations about abstraction, materiality and perception have unfolded simultaneously across Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Rather than recovering overlooked histories for their own sake, his exhibitions ask what new understandings emerge when these parallel histories are placed in dialogue.
That proposition defines AETHER COMMONS. Rather than positioning African artists within a European discourse, or Gierowski within a narrowly Polish one, the exhibition constructs a shared intellectual space in which abstraction emerges as a plurality of culturally situated ways of knowing. Here, light is understood simultaneously as physical phenomenon, material condition, spiritual force, cultural knowledge and cosmological principle. The exhibition’s title invokes the ancient notion of aether, once understood as the medium through which light travelled, alongside the idea of the commons, a place where different systems of knowledge coexist without hierarchy.
This is not the first time Nwagbogu has questioned the maps through which art history has been organised. Still, AETHER COMMONS feels especially assured in the way it refuses familiar binaries. It is not about Africa meeting Europe, nor about placing contemporary artists in conversation with a historical figure for the sake of comparison. Instead, it argues that artists working in different places and under different political conditions have long pursued remarkably similar enquiries into perception, materiality and the possibilities of abstraction, even if those conversations have remained separated by the narratives through which modernism has traditionally been understood. Gierowski’s paintings become the point of departure for an exhibition that is ultimately less concerned with influence than with affinity, less interested in rewriting history than in expanding it.
That ambition becomes immediately apparent on entering the exhibition. Nwagbogu has described the project as a series of conversations rather than a thematic survey, yet those conversations are carefully orchestrated. Rather than moving visitors through a chronological history of abstraction, the exhibition unfolds as a succession of encounters in which one work subtly alters the reading of the next. Looking becomes cumulative. Each gallery asks viewers to slow down, allowing relationships to emerge gradually rather than announcing themselves through curatorial instruction.
The opening gallery establishes that light is never treated as an isolated phenomenon. It is always encountered through matter. Suspended within the space, Andile Dyalvane’s Ngcip-ngciphu (Almost, almost) introduces this proposition with remarkable economy. Fired clay and hand-blown glass exist in delicate equilibrium, neither material dominating the other. The ceramic body retains the density of earth, while the glass appears to emerge from it almost organically, as though transformation remains ongoing rather than complete. Rather than presenting sculpture as static form, Dyalvane foregrounds process, reminding us that clay and glass are products of heat, gravity and time before they become objects of contemplation.
Placed alongside Gierowski’s paintings, Dyalvane’s work introduces a relationship that resonates throughout the exhibition. Although one artist works through paint and the other through clay, both are concerned with the way matter records transformation. Gierowski’s surfaces accumulate through repeated acts of looking and painting; Dyalvane’s ceramics emerge through the elemental passage of earth into fire. Their dialogue is not visual quotation but shared enquiry.
This emphasis on process reveals another, quieter rhythm within the exhibition. Fire appears repeatedly, even where it is no longer visible. It is present in Dyalvane’s ceramics and later in Zizipho Poswa’s sculptural vessels. It lingers in the scorched surfaces of Modupeola Fadugba’s paintings, in the glazing of ceramic works, in Hatoum’s glass marbles, in Hoyt’s embedded glass fragments and in the layered pigments of Gierowski’s paintings. Nwagbogu never explicitly frames the exhibition through the classical elements, yet earth, fire, water, air and light repeatedly surface through the works themselves, binding together practices that initially appear to have little in common.
That movement from material transformation to cosmological force reaches one of its clearest expressions in Mona Hatoum’s Turbulence (black). Thousands of black glass marbles spread across the floor, forming a vast field that appears simultaneously ordered and unstable. Every marble reflects light individually, yet together they absorb it into a dense, almost immeasurable darkness. The installation is visually seductive but physically unsettling. One instinctively keeps a careful distance, aware that a single step would disturb the entire surface.
Nwagbogu connects Hatoum’s installation with Gierowski’s Painting DCCCXLVIII, a late work in which a solitary dark form occupies an expansive field with extraordinary restraint. Both works reduce visual language to its essentials while suggesting forces far greater than their immediate scale. They do not depict cosmology so much as embody it. Matter becomes inseparable from gravity, perception and space, encouraging viewers to think less about what they are looking at than about the invisible conditions that shape what is seen.
The conversation shifts once again with Esther Mahlangu. For decades, her work has challenged the tendency to regard Ndebele painting primarily through the lens of tradition or decoration. Here, Nwagbogu presents Ndebele Abstract as a sophisticated visual language in its own right. Its circular format removes conventional orientation, allowing the eye to move continuously around the composition rather than settle upon a fixed point. Geometry becomes a means of organising knowledge, rhythm and spatial experience rather than simply ornamenting a surface.
Seen alongside Gierowski, Mahlangu’s work quietly dismantles one of modernism’s most persistent assumptions, that abstraction emerged principally through European avant-garde experimentation. Nwagbogu is not proposing direct influence between the artists, nor collapsing distinct histories into a universal language. Instead, he demonstrates that abstraction has always existed as multiple intellectual traditions, each responding to different cultural conditions while arriving at comparable philosophical questions. Harmony, rather than genealogy, becomes the organising principle.
Standing before Gierowski’s Painting CCCCLXXV, abstraction acquires another temporal dimension. The painting’s luminous surface is built through countless accumulated decisions. Every layer remains visible beneath the next, creating a depth that records time rather than gesture. It is painting as sustained investigation, each mark contributing to a coherent whole without announcing itself individually. The work reminds us that light, within Gierowski’s practice, is never instantaneous. It is patiently constructed.
That insistence on duration becomes increasingly important as the exhibition progresses. Again and again, Nwagbogu returns to the idea that contemporary audiences have forgotten how to look. Surrounded by rapidly circulating images, we often consume works of art through recognition rather than sustained attention. AETHER COMMONS proposes another tempo. Its works do not reveal themselves immediately. They reward time, patience and repeated looking, allowing perception itself to become the exhibition’s central medium.
As the exhibition opens into the Foundation’s reading room, the pace slows still further. Books, archival material and works on paper become part of the exhibition’s intellectual architecture rather than supplementary documentation. It is a space that encourages reflection before the journey continues, reminding visitors that seeing and reading are complementary acts, each capable of expanding the other. William Kentridge’s contribution, positioned within this quieter environment, introduces another way of thinking about accumulated knowledge, one that will resonate long after the final gallery has been reached.
If William Kentridge introduces the idea of accumulated knowledge, Satch Hoyt expands that proposition into a different register altogether. His paintings are not simply images but repositories of rhythm, movement and memory, where abstraction becomes inseparable from sound. Nwagbogu has spoken of Hoyt’s “urban grid” and “sonic mapping”, an observation that opens an important dimension of the exhibition. Geometry here is never static. It pulses, shifts and resonates, suggesting that cities, like paintings, are composed through repeated acts of movement rather than fixed order.
In When Twilight Bids, You Dance, points of dark pigment drift across a warm surface flecked with embedded glass. The implied grid is constantly interrupted, allowing rhythm to replace rigid structure. As the light changes, fragments of glass catch and release illumination, transforming the painting into something that is never entirely stable. It recalls Gierowski’s own refusal to treat abstraction as geometry alone. In both artists’ hands, abstraction becomes an event rather than a system, continually renewed through the viewer’s movement and attention.
That sense of restraint deepens in Fugitivity. Dense, almost monochromatic, the painting refuses spectacle. Only prolonged looking begins to reveal its internal complexity. The title invokes the Black radical tradition in which fugitivity is understood not merely as escape but as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. Darkness becomes productive rather than empty, holding histories that refuse immediate visibility. It is one of several moments in AETHER COMMONS where the exhibition quietly rewards patience over instant recognition.
Patience also underpins Modupeola Fadugba’s monumental Mother and Child, although here it is embodied through material transformation. One of painting’s oldest subjects is reimagined through a surface that has itself passed through fire. Burning becomes part of the work’s physical history rather than simply a visual effect. Across the scorched canvas, thousands of beads catch incoming light, creating a luminous field that shifts continually as viewers move through the gallery. Figures and surface remain inseparable. The work does not illustrate care so much as embody endurance, suggesting that memory, protection and resilience emerge through transformation rather than despite it.
At this point, another pattern begins to reveal itself. Throughout the exhibition, light is rarely presented as something external. Instead, it is generated from within the material itself. Clay records fire. Burned canvas retains heat. Glass stores and redirects illumination. Metal reflects movement. Paint accumulates light through countless layers. Without ever announcing a singular theory, the exhibition repeatedly suggests that luminosity is something discovered through making.
Few works articulate that proposition more powerfully than Zizipho Poswa’s uMameKhaya (Woman of the Home). Combining fired earthenware with bronze, glass and electrical components, the sculpture literally becomes a source of light. The distinction is profound. Rather than receiving illumination, it produces it. Drawing upon Xhosa ceremonial traditions, Poswa positions the maternal figure as an active transmitter of cultural knowledge. The work proposes that inheritance is never static. Like light itself, it is continually generated, shared and renewed.
Seen alongside Gierowski’s paintings, Poswa’s sculpture transforms the exhibition’s understanding of abstraction. Both artists treat their chosen materials as living records of elemental process. Clay, pigment and fire become repositories of time, labour and accumulated knowledge. Their dialogue is not one of formal similarity but of shared philosophical commitment.
Olafur Eliasson’s Seven Undefined Days Visiting from the Future marks a quiet transition from material transformation towards perceptual experience. After the physical presence of Poswa’s sculpture, the seven intimate watercolours require viewers to recalibrate their attention. Eliasson has spent decades investigating not light itself but the conditions through which light is experienced. Here, colour hovers delicately across paper, resisting narrative or chronology. The title dissolves the familiar structure of measured time, inviting viewers to encounter each work as a distinct state of perception rather than a representation of it.
El Anatsui’s untitled tapestry returns perception to the physical world. Constructed from thousands of flattened bottle caps joined with copper wire, the monumental surface never settles into a fixed form. Air currents subtly alter its folds, causing bronze highlights to flare before dissolving again into shadow. The work seems almost alive, its luminosity emerging not from the material alone but from its continual responsiveness to space and movement. The discarded remnants of consumption are transformed into something unexpectedly radiant, demonstrating that light can be released from the most ordinary of materials through acts of patient accumulation.
Within the Perceptual Fields section, Alessandra Carosi introduces another shift in emphasis. If Eliasson investigates how colour is experienced and Anatsui reveals light through material movement, Carosi occupies the threshold between the visible and the intangible. Her work slows perception even further, encouraging viewers to recognise that seeing is never neutral but continually negotiated between body, object and space. Positioned late in the exhibition, it functions as a moment of quiet recalibration before the final encounter, reminding us that perception itself is a material condition rather than a transparent act.
That enquiry reaches its culmination in Julian Kyusang Lee’s Cinema. Composed of light, sound, photography and architectural structure, the installation occupies the uncertain territory between moving image and sculpture. Rather than presenting a stable visual experience, it exposes the mechanisms through which perception is assembled. Nearby, 24 Notations on a Single Motif extends the same investigation. Two apparently identical photographic handprints gradually reveal subtle shifts in atmosphere and colour, demonstrating how prolonged attention alters what is seen. The works do not provide answers. Instead, they invite viewers to remain within the act of looking itself.
Only at this point does the exhibition’s larger structure become fully apparent. Standing at opposite ends of the galleries, William Kentridge’s Learning the Flute and Julian Kyusang Lee’s Cinema quietly establish conceptual bookends. Kentridge asks how knowledge accumulates through marks, memory and history. Lee asks how perception itself is constructed. Between them unfolds an exhibition that gently but insistently retrains the eye, demonstrating that seeing is never passive but learned through attention, material and experience.
AETHER COMMONS: Refracted Cosmologies does not seek to replace one art historical narrative with another. Its achievement lies elsewhere. By placing Stefan Gierowski in dialogue with artists from Africa, Asia and Europe, Nwagbogu reveals that abstraction has never belonged to a single geography or intellectual tradition. Instead, it has emerged repeatedly through different cultural understandings of light, matter and perception. In doing so, the exhibition expands modernism not by redrawing its boundaries, but by revealing that they were never as fixed as we had been led to believe.
Brendon Bell-Roberts is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of ART AFRICA.
AETHER COMMONS: Refracted Cosmologies is on view at the Stefan Gierowski Foundation, 8/11 Dąbrowskiego Square, 00-055 Warsaw, Poland and runs until 18 October 2026.
