9 Places in the World to Find Igor Mitoraj’s Giants
A dedicated museum to one of Poland’s most important sculptors is finally opening in his adopted hometown of Pietrasanta, Italy – but Igor Mitoraj’s fractured giant sculptures have been appearing in public spaces across the globe for decades. Here’s where to find them.
Igor Mitoraj (1944–2014) was born Jerzy Makina in Oederan, Germany, to a Polish forced labourer and a French legionnaire. He grew up in Poland, and later took his stepfather’s surname. Though it reads like a masterclass in cosmic branding, ‘Mitoraj’ isn’t a deliberate artistic blend of the Polish words for ‘myth’ (mit) and ‘paradise’ (raj). It was simply a legal coincidence. Even though he spent a lifetime creating beautiful, broken paradises out of ancient myths, he never chose the name. He just spent his career earning it.
He also spent that career placing enormous, bandaged fragments of figures in the paths of people who weren’t necessarily looking for art. Heads lying on ancient cobblestones. Torsos missing their limbs. Faces wrapped as if trying to hold themselves together. His answer to whether beauty can be complete without traces of suffering was, clearly, no.
Now the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to Mitoraj’s life and work opens on 6 June 2026 in Pietrasanta, Tuscany. So it’s the perfect moment to explore where else in the world people have been living with his giants.
1. Kraków, Poland – Main Market Square
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'Eros Bendato' by Igor Mitoraj, Main Square in Kraków, photo: Deposit / East News
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Eros Bendato is a monumental, bandaged male head without eyes, lying directly on the pavement in Kraków’s historic Main Square – it was gifted to the city by the artist himself in 2005. Mitoraj had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts here under Tadeusz Kantor, and his return, decades later, with a 1,900-kilogram bronze head that he insisted on placing in one of Europe’s most photographed medieval squares, says quite a lot about him. It has since become one of the city’s unofficial meeting places.
Another version of Eros Bendato can also be found thousands of miles west in Saint Louis, Missouri. Citygarden Sculpture Park, located in the city’s downtown, isn’t quite as busy as Kraków’s Main Square, but you’ll still find plenty of children wanting to climb all over Mitoraj’s famous sculpture.
There are several examples of Mitoraj’s works in Poland’s capital, too, including Winged Icarus outside the Museum of Sports and the remarkable entrance doors to the Old Town’s Jesuit Church. The newest Mitoraj sculpture to appear in the city is the four-metre-tall Tindaro, which now stands directly in front of the Palace of Culture and Science’s entrance on Centralny Square.
2. Rome, Italy – Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri
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Partial view of Igor Mitoraj's sculpted doors for the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Rome, Italy, photo: Maciek Malec / CC BY-SA 4.0
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In early 2006, Mitoraj unveiled the monumental bronze doors (Porta dell’Annunciazione and Porta della Risurrezione) for this Michelangelo-designed basilica. It incorporates an image of John Paul II, who had recently passed away, making the doors a tribute to the Polish Pope and to Mitoraj’s sense of where he came from. The Catholic basilica itself was built inside the ruins of the Ancient Roman Baths of Diocletian, and now it has bronze doors by a Polish sculptor born in a German prisoner-of-war camp: a complicated history worth savouring.
3. Pompeii, Italy – The Archaeological Site
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Sculpture by Igor Mitoraj on display at Pompeii archaeological site, the ancient Roman city, destroyed in 79 BC by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, photo: W. Jarek / Getty Images
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It was Mitoraj’s last wish before his death in 2014 to have his sculptures displayed among the ruins of Pompeii, a dream realised with a massive posthumous exhibition in 2016. While most of the 30 bronzes eventually moved on, two spectacular pieces were permanently gifted to the site by the Mitoraj Foundation: the wingless Daedalus, standing near the Temple of Venus, and a shadowed Centaur in the Forum. You can’t fault his logic: his cracked, weathered, half-missing figures placed among actual cracked, weathered, half-missing ancient Roman buildings is rather fitting.
4. London, UK – Canary Wharf
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'Testa Addormentata' by Igor Mitoraj, bronze, 1983, located at Bank Street, outside West Wintergarden, Canary Wharf, London, Great Britain, photo: Garry Knight / CC BY-SA 2.0
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Testa Addormentata (Head Asleep), made in 1983, is a bandaged female head on its side, rendered in a classical Greek style – it has been on Bank Street at Canary Wharf for decades. There are two further pieces in the Canary Wharf complex: Centurione I and Centauro, both bronze and both from the mid-1980s. The effect of ancient, mythological, fractured humanity staring out from one of Europe’s most aggressively corporate financial districts is – intentionally or otherwise – quite pointed.
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'Moonlight', a bronze statue by Igor Mitoraj, 1991, in front of the British Museum, London, photo: Fausto Giaccone / Anzenberger / Forum
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But probably the most-seen Mitoraj work in London was Tsuki-No-Hikari (Moonlight), a monumental half-head that spent years in the British Museum’s vast entrance courtyard. His modern relic as the welcoming face to the world’s most famous repository of ancient civilisational relics became one of the defining images of his career. But in recent years, it went into storage, freeing up its former spot to accommodate the increasing number of visitors to the museum.
5. Lausanne, Switzerland – The Olympic Park
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Porta Italica (1997) is another monumental bronze fragment of a face installed in the park’s sculpture trail that winds down toward Lake Geneva. The Olympic Park sits alongside the Olympic Museum, home to the world’s largest archive of Olympic memorabilia. This provides visitors with an amusing juxtaposition: among bronzes of long-distance runners Emil Zátopek and Paavo Nurmi and other examples of physical perfection, they come across Mitoraj’s customary counter-argument – something ancient, run down, but somehow even more epic than any Olympian. The park is free to walk through, and the views over Lac Léman are wonderful, so it’s worth the stroll.
6. Paris, France – La Défense
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'Grand Toscano' by Igor Mitoraj, in front of a tower block, La Défense, Paris, France, photo: J. Hildebrandt / Broker / Forum
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Mitoraj’s first monumental sculpture, Grand Toscano, has been anchored at La Défense since 1981, joined over the years by Ikaria and Icare. Giving this half-torso and half-face an extra head embedded where its heart should be and an embossed mini-body below is one of Mitoraj’s more enigmatic artistic choices. But ultimately, La Défense is Paris’s answer to Canary Wharf, and the effect of the context is similarly loaded with meaning: ancient, crumbling human forms in a glittering landscape of glass and steel.
7. Agrigento, Sicily – Valley of the Temples
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'Fallen Icarus' by Igor Mitoraj in front of the Temple of Concordia, Valley of The Temples in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy, photo: Mauro Flamini / REDA / Universal Images Group / Forum
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Icaro Caduto (Fallen Icarus) – a prone, wing-broken bronze figure – is installed in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, the famed ancient Greek archaeological site in southern Sicily. Left behind as a permanent fixture after a major temporary exhibition in 2011, it sits right in front of the Temple of Concordia. When people talk about Mitoraj understanding context as a sculptural element, this is the best example of what they mean: a fallen mythological figure, in fragments, among the ruins of the civilisation that invented him.
8. Washington DC, USA – Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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'Gorgon Hunters' by Igor Mitoraj, 1987, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA, photo: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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Works by Mitoraj are held in the huge permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. – one of the major modern and contemporary art collections in the United States. Pieces are moved around on a regular basis, but you may be able to catch his Gorgon Hunters if you keep your eyes peeled. What’s most important is how Hirshhorn is an indicator of where the international art market has placed him: in the permanent company of Rodin, Calder and Brancusi.
9. Pietrasanta, Italy – The town itself
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Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj pictured near one of his works in the garden of his country house at Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy, 29 July 2010, photo: Vittoriano Rastelli / Corbis via Getty Images
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Long before the museum, there was the town. Mitoraj arrived in Tuscany in the late 1970s, fell so thoroughly in love with Pietrasanta that he moved his studio there, and in 2001 was made an honorary citizen. The town became something of an open-air gallery of his work, and he ended up being buried there.
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The Igor Mitoraj Museum in Pietrasanta, Italy, a visualisation by Studio OBR (Open Building Research), photo: https://www.museomitoraj.it
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The new museum, housed in a revitalised modernist market hall from the 1960s, is opening thanks to a collaboration between the Italian Ministry of Culture, town authorities, and the artist’s heirs. It is the formal acknowledgement of what the town has been for decades: Mitoraj’s home for over 30 years, and the place that understood him best.
Written by Adam Zulawski, June 2026