WARSAW — When the new director of Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Janusz Janowski, was appointed last year, he was the city’s second art museum director in two years to be nominated by Poland’s right-wing populist government without an open job search. Janowski has no previous administrative or managerial experience and is virtually unknown among Poland’s contemporary art scene. Last month, he contributed an essay to deliberation.eu — a new platform for Europe’s right-wing conservatives — in which he envisions the art institution as “a spiritual space” that precludes political agendas, including LGBTQ+ and other human rights. His inaugural exhibition is expected to open in a few months, although details are scarce.

Zachęta’s current exhibition, The Discomfort of Evening, has the scale and ambition of a biennial that will be unthinkable once Janowski’s regressive and discriminatory ideologies are implemented. The show focuses on younger Polish artists (most born in the 1990s), including several active in Warsaw’s art scene. Five of its six rooms are packed with an array of works, such as video projections next to paintings, salon-style displays, photographs, sculptures in conversation with installations, and various flatscreen TVs. In one poor curatorial decision, framed drawings, beautifully rendered by Iwo Panasiewicz, are placed flat on a narrow table instead of being hung on the wall.

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