Konrad Maciejewicz, Paweł Zaręba

“How long do you intend to remain happy?” — the Romantic poet Percy Shelley is said to have heard this question from his doppelgänger just one week before his death. He often encountered these surreal doubles, as his wife Mary Shelley recalls in her diaries. And there is little reason to doubt her — after all, she is the author of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written during the fabled “year without a summer,” and perhaps the first to glimpse, in the shadow of technological progress, the emerging contours of existential dread.

Yet modernity has given us more than just stitched-together monsters. It has also become the era in which the doppelgänger — that mythical figure, a perfect mimic of movement and form — has found a comfortable, perhaps permanent, home. Once a harbinger of misfortune, a trigger of chaos, the double now proliferates, echoing through the fractures of contemporary life.

Crisis, however, is not solely destructive; it is a rupture through which the new is born. When the ground trembles, it signals the exhaustion of something old. Faced with this erosion, reality does not merely unravel — it splits. Across this rupture, global doppelgängers stare each other down: political, cultural, ethical.

It is within this fissure that Konrad Maciejewicz and Paweł Zaręba propose a duality of their own. Rather than engage in dialogue, they provoke collision — an atomic reaction. At the intersection of Zaręba’s contemplative paintings and Maciejewicz’s eschatological objects, an alternative physics emerges. A tension takes shape between their works, one that turns established orders inside out. Paintings become mirrors; ordinary objects, ritual votives. The viewer becomes the viewed — a guest within an un-home, where the mundane blends with the uncanny. Like Alice, we are invited to cross over, blur the boundaries, and assume a new form.

On the other side of the mirror, the game was chess — as it was for Marcel Duchamp, chess player and voyeur. In their own game of seeing, Maciejewicz and Zaręba go all in: white for black, a pawn topples the queen. Checkmate.

Curator: Kamil Kuitkowski