The long wait for the new Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw: ‘We always seemed to be negotiating our existence’

Central Square in downtown Warsaw is immense. Occupying 60 acres, it has had umpteen uses since its creation in the 1950s. Reflecting its erstwhile name of Parade Square, it hosted many a political procession during Poland’s era of communist rule. Pope John Paul II gave a giant open-air mass there in 1987. Funfairs and flea markets filled it in the 1990s, since when the square has mostly served as a parking lot.

‘Now, however, it’s being totally reimagined,’ says Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (also known as MSN Warsaw). ‘There’s no square in Europe like this one, and the topic of how to use it caused discussion, disagreement and tension in Poland for a long time.’

More on this below, but Mytkowska is referring to a period that began in 1989 with the collapse of communism. Eventually, the city of Warsaw decided that the square should serve a cultural purpose. A theatre called TR Warszawa is currently under construction — on a site adjacent to MSN Warsaw, which opened in February.

Spread across four floors, the museum owns an ever-expanding art collection, currently numbering about 4,000 pieces. It focuses chiefly on work made in the 36 years since democracy returned to Poland. International artists do feature, but two-thirds of the pieces are by Poles — the likes of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mirosław Bałka, Wilhelm Sasnal and Ewa Juszkiewicz.

According to Time magazine, MSN Warsaw is one of the ‘World’s Greatest Places’ to visit in 2025, part of the draw being the building itself: a coolly minimalist, rectangular structure made of white concrete.

One might see the museum as an expression of confident, modern-day Poland — a country whose economy is growing at such a rate that it is now among the 20 largest on Earth.

The plan is to combine displays and exhibitions of different sizes, based on MSN Warsaw’s holdings and outside loans. The initial offering, however, is a show titled The Impermanent. Spread out across the entire venue, it features 150 highlights from the museum collection.

Works include Façade by Monika Sosnowska, a replica of the curtain wall of a 1960s building, which has been crushed, twisted and stretched; and Eurotique by Henrike Naumann, an installation that resembles a furniture showroom — alluding to the rush of citizens to embrace consumerism in the 1990s and deck out their homes in Western fashion.

Another highlight is June, one of 12 large-format textiles shown by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in Poland’s pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Modelled on an allegorical set of Renaissance frescoes at Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, these are replete with references to the artist’s Romani heritage.

‘It’s a relief the museum is now open,’ Mytkowska says. ‘People can simply come in and enjoy it, where before we always seemed to be negotiating our existence with society. It was one crisis after another.’

Entirely publicly funded, MSN Warsaw cost the city of Warsaw $175 million. This goes some way to explaining the fraught backdrop to its opening. For the full story, however, one needs to look back 80 years.

During the Second World War, much of Warsaw was reduced to rubble, including a residential area where Parade Square and a gargantuan building called the Palace of Culture and Science would subsequently emerge. The latter was Stalin’s gift to the Polish people, and he sent thousands of Soviet workers to build it. Upon completion in 1955, it became the tallest building not just in Warsaw but all Poland (at 757 feet — 230 metres — high, it was only surpassed three years ago by the Foster + Partners-designed skyscraper, Varso Tower).

The palace housed offices, theatres, a congress hall, a museum of technology, and more. Though officially a gift, it served also as a symbol of Soviet potency in the heart of Warsaw. Locals loathed it. They even told a joke that the best view of their city was from the palace roof, as it was the only place in Warsaw where you couldn’t see the palace.

The correspondingly large Parade Square was constructed at the building’s base. It was designed by the leaders of the Polish People’s Republic for rallies and parades, often featuring tanks — in other words, for ideological spectacle rather than everyday life.

All of which left the tricky question of what to do with palace and square alike when communism fell. There was occasional talk of demolition, but nothing came of it.

Fast-forward to 2004, the year Poland joined the European Union. With the backing of the national government, the city of Warsaw decided to mark this new era by building five museums: the Polish History Museum, the Polish Army Museum, the Warsaw Rising Museum, a museum of contemporary art (located on Parade Square), and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

All five are now open — though, in MSN Warsaw’s case, only after a long wait. The obstacles were myriad, significant among them being a lack of consensus over how an architect should be selected. Three different competitions were held in the space of a decade. It’s said that a proposal by Zaha Hadid was rejected in the first competition because she had failed to tick a box saying she didn’t have a criminal record.

In 2007, the museum’s initial director resigned, unhappy that Swiss architect Christian Kerez had won the second competition. Which is when Mytkowska, then a curator at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, took up the reins. ‘I was young and naive at that time,’ she says. ‘I was filled with enthusiasm, but had no idea what a huge task opening a museum would be.’

One particular obstacle seemed insurmountable. After the war, swathes of Warsaw’s land had been nationalised. Once re-privatisation began in the 1990s, many citizens filed lawsuits, claiming to be the rightful (hereditary) owners of given plots — particularly plots in the city centre, which had the greatest value.

‘We couldn’t get a building permit,’ Mytkowska says, ‘because it couldn’t be proved that the municipality owned the site for construction. After four years, the project was cancelled.’

MSN Warsaw duly began life as a nomadic museum, showing work in a series of temporary homes such as a riverside pavilion and a former furniture store. ‘We felt there was more to us than just a building,’ says Mytkowska, ‘and we ended up developing a community of followers, as well as a cultural voice within Warsaw, which ultimately led to the museum being built.’

After toying with the idea of turning Parade Square into an office-and-retail space, the city authorities reverted to plan A — albeit with a fresh architectural competition. In 2014, a proposal by the US architect Thomas Phifer was adopted (his CV including recent expansions of Glenstone museum in Maryland, and the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York). With new momentum, all claims to plots of land were settled, and in the words of the spokesperson for Warsaw’s then mayor, Parade Square had ‘become uncursed’.

The museum had a soft opening for two weeks in the autumn of 2024. A few large-scale artworks were put on view, but the main purpose was to showcase the building.

On the ground floor are a bookshop, an auditorium and a café, as well as the start of an M.C. Escher-like double staircase, with two flights that diverge and reunite as one ascends. On the first and second floors are 4,500 square metres of gallery space, with skylights and large windows ensuring an abundance of light.

Opinion about the building was split. Some critics longed for something more audacious — the Polish architect Radosław Gajda, for example, stating that it is ‘devoid of anchor points’. Others compared the structure to a bunker, a shoebox and an IKEA warehouse.

That said, an impressive 600,000 people have visited the museum since its official opening six months ago. ‘With our first few shows, we’ll have to get used to the size of the new building, because it’s five times bigger than any of our previous spaces,’ Mytkowska says. ‘But we’re looking forward to the challenge.’

In October, the latest edition of the (currently itinerant) Kyiv Biennial will open at MSN Warsaw. The museum will also host The Woman Question: 1550-2025, an exhibition of work made by female artists (Polish and foreign) over the past five centuries: they range from Artemisia Gentileschi to Małgorzata Mycek, a non-binary, millennial performance artist from Poznań.

Mytkowska says that MSN Warsaw will aim to be ‘local and global at the same time’. Which is to say, plugged into international art currents while always keeping the Varsovian public in mind.

That public will have a further chance to sample Poland’s burgeoning contemporary art scene when Warsaw Gallery Weekend takes place later this month (19-21 September). Held annually, it is now in its 15th edition, with 54 exhibitions set to open at galleries across the city.

‘The scene is developing rapidly — it’s an interesting time for Poland,’ Mytkowska says. She means politically as well as artistically. From 2015 until its electoral defeat late in 2023, the country was run by the conservative Law and Justice Party. Its ministers had several run-ins with the (predominantly liberal) directors of Poland’s arts institutions — in the name of promoting traditional values and viewpoints.

Today, the country is governed by a centrist coalition. However, Mytkowska insists that she does not want MSN Warsaw to get dragged into a culture war. ‘We are open to those of all political persuasions,’ she says. ‘If contemporary art talks to only one milieu, that’s the end of contemporary art.’

In June, Parade Square was officially renamed Central Square, as part of a drive to reimagine it as an appealing public space. Trees, shrubs and perennials have been planted, and 100 benches introduced.

The Palace of Culture and Science is still open — popular with visitors who take a lift up to its 30th-floor viewing terrace — and the TR Warszawa theatre looks set for completion by 2029. The idea is to integrate elements of the city’s past into its future, with MSN Warsaw at the centre of it all.

The Impermanent continues until 5 October 2025. The Woman Question: 1550-2025 runs from 21 November 2025 to 3 May 2026. The sixth edition of the Kyiv Biennial takes place from 3 October 2025 to 18 January 2026