As part of Berlin Art Week, KVOST is presenting the Polish artist Izabella Gustowska (b. 1948). Gustowska is this year’s KVOST scholarship holder and will receive the 2026 Claus Michaletz Prize. The exhibition forms part of the ‘Featured’ section of Berlin Art Week. Since the 1970s, Izabella Gustowska has been one of the leading figures in conceptually oriented Polish art. Her work operates at the intersection of bodily representation, the construction of the subject and feminist visual criticism, and explores the conditions of visual perception as well as the cultural production of identity. As a professor at the University of Arts in Poznań, she has influenced several generations of artists. She gained international recognition through, amongst other things, her participation in the São Paulo Biennial (1983, 1987) and the Venice Biennale (1988).
Image above: Izabella Gustowska / She and I / 2025 / Installationsansicht / Courtesy: Izabella Gustowska und KVOST, Berlin.
For her exhibition at KVOST, Gustowska is presenting new works that explore the themes of memory, identity and temporality. The starting point is the family home in Poznań, where her family has lived since 1938 and which serves as a space of both biographical and cultural memory. The new works enter into a dialogue with key pieces from the 1980s, which were created whilst she was living there, and allow for a retrospective examination of recurring motifs and themes within her body of work.
In her work, Gustowska explores the boundaries of one’s own identity as reflected in the other. A recurring theme is sibling relationships, and in particular the special bonds between twins. The relationship between the self and the other thus becomes a central motif in her artistic practice.
A key work in the exhibition is the video Home’s Shadows, which depicts a sentimental journey into the past and an attempt to retrace the footsteps of childhood. This classic form of topophilia – that is, the search for identity through space – is, in Gustowska’s view, a narrative about who she was and what has become of that ‘self’ from back then.
The rooms of the house strike her as resonant spaces of past incarnations. Another key source of inspiration for the film was Paul Éluard’s poem Dans Paris, which speaks of the box-like nature of a place: Paris with its street, the house, the staircase, the room, the table, the tablecloth, the cage, the nest, the egg and the bird. Much like in Éluard’s work, various elements such as a table or fantastical birds also appear in Gustowska’s video, transforming the garden into a magical place.
One of the key works in the exhibition is Dinner Party, which is inspired by an archive photograph from the artist’s childhood. The photograph shows her sister with friends seated at a round table. Gustowska intervenes directly in this memory by supplementing the image with a visual reference to Judy Chicago’s famous installation The Dinner Party (1974–79): the place card dedicated to Virginia Woolf, which alludes to the feminist memory project aimed at highlighting significant women in history. In this way, the seemingly everyday scene takes on a new meaning: The private memory of life in the villa in Poznań is linked to Virginia Woolf’s call for ‘a room of one’s own’ from A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Judy Chicago’s symbolic table of female solidarity. At the same time, the scene can also be read as a kind of séance – a ritual of conjuring up spirits, in which the past and the present enter into dialogue with one another.
The Claus Michaletz Prize honours the memory of Claus Michaletz, the publisher and founder of the Secco Pontanova Foundation. It is awarded annually to artists from Eastern Europe and carries a prize of 10,000 euros. The prize is linked to the KVOST scholarship; the scholarship holders are free to use the full amount of the prize money as they see fit. In conjunction with the already established KVOST scholarship, the Claus Michaletz Prize enables the sustainable and long-term support of artists.
WHEN?
Opening and awards ceremony: Wednesday, 9 September 2026, 6 pm –9 pm
Berlin Art Week ‘Featured Night’: Drinks & music by Ewa Sad: Friday, 11 September 2026, 6 pm – 10 pm
Exhibition period: Thursday 10 September to Saturday 28 November 2026
Opening hours: Wed – Sat, 2 pm – 6 pm
Special opening hours for Berlin Art Week: Thu – Sun, 2 pm – 6 pm
WHERE?
KVOST
Leipziger Strasse 47 /
Eingang Jerusalemer Strasse
10117 Berlin
. Gustowska is this year’s KVOST scholarship ...){kind=link}