‘Polish Posters Now!’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London
This exhibition of four Polish poster artists offers an opportunity to reflect on the medium of poster art itself, as well as being a showcase of the extraordinary richness of this field – all the more impressive because it is being presented in a concise, humorous and original form. The event is part of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s UK / Poland Season 2025.
There is no doubt that the poster is a unique medium, at once artistic yet independent of the gallery or museum context, sometimes treated frivolously compared to painting or drawing yet also characterized by long, avant-garde traditions. While being a somewhat outdated medium – after all, social-media feeds now fulfil the function of posters – it paradoxically expresses contemporary aspirations to fuse art with marketing culture in propaganda campaigns.
The poster’s exceptional status in Poland is undeniable. After all, the so-called Polish school of poster art remains one of the pinnacles of Polish art to this day. This art is associated with artists such as Henryk Tomaszewski, Tadeusz Trepkowski, Wojciech Zamecznik, Eryk Lipiński and Jan Lenica. Distinctive lines, conciseness and succinctness of message and an apt grasp of what is most distinctive and unique about the poster – these distinguish not only the old masters but also the contemporary generation of artists, sometimes drawing on tradition and other times, conversely, distinctly breaking away from it. In both approaches, the artists offer an original perspective on what a poster could represent today.
Embeded gallery style
Display slider (default)
The exhibition Polish Posters Now! – organized at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of the Polish-British cultural program of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute – presents these four very different concepts. The exhibition will feature a selection of works by artists Ola Jasionowska, Patrycja Longawa, Kaja Renkas and Maja Wolna, demonstrating not only the diversity of formal solutions but, above all, the diverse interpretations of the relationship between posters and their subject matter: from metonymic distillation, through collage-like deconstruction, to refined aestheticization.
In the case of Jasionowska, known particularly for her extensive collaboration with Warsaw City Hall, for which she designed posters for social and image campaigns, we are witnessing a clear allusion to tradition, not even to that of the second half of the 20th century but rather to an earlier, Art Deco–inspired era of ocean liners and modernist villas. Her simplified posters, based on color contrast, are characterized by elegant, often streamlined shapes, graphic simplicity and decisive linework. This is the case, for example, in a graphic artwork advertising Warsaw exhibited in London. The artwork features only the recognizable silhouette of the Rotunda and the office building behind it. In the illustration, the distinctive buildings successfully become synonymous with the entire city, especially since the simplification of forms transforms them into symbols. The buildings are framed by a gently rounded band of white, aptly expressing the dynamism of the metropolis but above all harking back to the aesthetics of the 1930s, with its appreciation for technologically inspired elegance echoing the appearance of ships, cars and airplanes. If Art Deco allowed for optimism and a belief in the benefits that the technological age would bring, Jasionowska’s work reveals a similar excitement associated with the pace of urban life and its inherent constant transformation.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
‘Polish Posters Now! Polski Plakat Dziś!’, Victoria & Albert Museum, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
Picture image
250919_polish_posters_va_028.jpg
Kaja Renkas draws on other references, also inspired by the 20th-century avant-garde but more in its Dadaist-surrealist version. Let us take, for example, a poster advertising the Silesian Planetarium in Chorzów: above the silhouette of a headless woman dressed in a modest, black, fully enclosed dress looms the Chorzów facility’s distinctive dome, seemingly standing in for the woman’s head. This terse joke, this pictorial play, reveals not only a sense of humor but also the artist’s talent for finding simple, functional, yet ambiguous connections and associations. The same is true of the poster advertising Ryszard Kaja’s 2013 exhibition Plakaty (Posters) at the Galeria Polskiego Plakatu (Polish Poster Gallery) in Wrocław. Here in the foreground, we see a man in a bowler hat, his body disintegrating into other representations: ships and tents, fish, entrails, dense webs of nerves and blood vessels. Referencing the Dadaist work of George Grosz, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann, this work is not only an intertextual play but also an apt depiction of the internal diversity of the poster world, which a single coherent symbol cannot express.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
‘Polish Posters Now! Polski Plakat Dziś!’, Victoria & Albert Museum, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
Picture image
250919_polish_posters_va_023.jpg
If Renkas was more interested in deconstruction, Maja Wolna is interested rather in synthesis. Although the artist primarily works in social posters related to human rights, with a particular emphasis on women’s rights – for her contribution to this area, she was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Poster Biennale – the London exhibition presents her works of a somewhat different nature. In these, the poster designer takes on figures from the art world and, with daring simplifications, captures what is most unique to them. Tilda Swinton, Jim Jarmusch, Bob Dylan and Pina Bausch are immediately recognizable not because of their resemblance but also because of Wolna’s talent for capturing some unspecified yet decisive feature, the essence of the model. The artist is not alone in her explorations and aesthetic inspirations; her works strikingly correspond to, for example, Karol Radziszewski’s Cubism-rooted portraits.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
‘Polish Posters Now! Polski Plakat Dziś!’, Victoria & Albert Museum, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
Picture image
250919_polish_posters_va_026.jpg
A different kind of synthesis is proposed by Patrycja Longawa, the one among the artists who most clearly draws on the tradition of the Polish school of poster art, manifesting itself in the distinctive, subtle surrealism of her drawings, which are not devoid of humour. This quality is well illustrated by the poster for her exhibition Kulturalnie i muzycznie (Culturally and Musically) at the Dworek Białoprądnicki Cultural Centre in Kraków from 2025 depicting a simplified silhouette of a woman with a patch of red hair and a black hat, seemingly borrowed from Przekrój (Cross-Section) magazine. She is blowing a horn-like instrument from which various artistic implements emerge: a pen, a brush and a crayon. Her playing with representations, colour contrasts and textural differences (a silhouette outlined in horizontal lines is next to a colour spot taken from a Japanese woodcut) clearly refers to the greatest achievements of the Polish poster, which managed to contain an extraordinary variety of styles and solutions in a simple presentation.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
‘Polish Posters Now! Polski Plakat Dziś!’, Victoria & Albert Museum, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
Picture image
250919_polish_posters_va_014.jpg
Although the London exhibition presents a deliberately limited landscape of Polish poster art, the range of individual creative strategies is already evident in what is presented here. Even if the show suggests certain broader trends governing contemporary poster art – a tendency toward simplification, a reliance on strikingly combined bold colours and on visual puns and humour – the juxtaposition of four leading poster artists highlights, above all, the importance of an individual perspective from which these broader trends can be viewed in a completely different way.
Polish Poster Now! / Polski Plakat Dziś!
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 13 September 2025–8 February 2026
Artists: Ola Jasionowska, Patrycja Longawa, Kaja Renkas, Maja Wolna
This event is part of UK / Poland Season 2025, organized by the British Council, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute in London and funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.
Written in Polish by Aleksander Kmak, 10 October 2025
Translated by Michał Pelczar