Łukasz Stokłosa. Shining

Łukasz Stokłosa’s paintings were shown among the monumental works of Jan Matejko. The exhibition ran from 16 January to 31 October 2026.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw on the exhibition:

We are showing Łukasz Stokłosa’s paintings among the monumental works of Jan Matejko. Together they form a dialogue on the painted interpretation of history - one of the pillars of the Royal Castle’s identity.

For centuries history was a source of knowledge, of warnings and of guidance for the future. Knowing it was to be the key to reforming the state and to raising conscious citizens. Jan Matejko appealed to that idea in the nineteenth century. It was his visions that shaped how successive generations of Poles imagined the country’s history - its moments of splendour, but also the causes of its fall.

Łukasz Stokłosa’s works are a contemporary commentary on the historical painting hanging on the Castle’s walls. The artist takes photographic frames of the interiors of former residences of power, among them Ca’Rezzonico in Venice, Charlottenburg, Fontainebleau, Versailles, the Royal Łazienki and the Royal Castle in Warsaw. He turns them into paintings that radiate silence and emptiness. Spaces that were once centres of court and political life he shows as museum interiors, enduring outside their original context. He provokes questions about what former residences of power mean for our identity.

Łukasz Stokłosa was born in 1986 in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. He is a painter and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (2010). He has several dozen solo and group exhibitions to his name, in Poland and abroad.

What to expect

The museum stated that the exhibition completed a visit to the Castle: with a ticket for the Museum Route and the Royal Route, a walk through the historic interiors was combined with an encounter with contemporary art. The exhibition could be seen during the Castle’s opening hours.

The Castle published its description of the exhibition on its website.

Updates

• 2 November 2026: the exhibition closed on 31 October 2026; the museum announced no extension.

After the show

On now at the Royal Castle in Warsaw:

• Key in the Castle - DreamWear - the next show in the series in which the Castle sets a selected work of contemporary art beside its own collection: Urszula Pieregończuk’s garment covered with characters from animated films, paired with a 17th-century portrait of Maksymilian Franciszek Ossoliński with his sons, the same dialogue between old and contemporary art as in “Shining”; until 6 December 2026.
• The Secret Chambers of the People’s Authorities - a show about the luxury apartments fitted out in the Castle, then under reconstruction, for foreign guests of the communist authorities, again about the interiors of a residence of power; until 17 January 2027.
• Gisleni. A Roman Architect in Poland - nearly thirty large-format drawings by Giovanni Battista Gisleni, who came to Warsaw as a lute player and ended up designing royal interiors and city churches; until 13 December 2026.

Related exhibitions on now elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Heliograms in the Solomon Room. In Search of Light - at the Royal Łazienki Museum until 31 January 2027; Nicolas Grospierre’s heliograms in the empty frames left by Marcello Bacciarelli’s paintings in the Palace on the Isle, contemporary art in a former royal residence whose interiors Stokłosa also painted.

Museum profile: The Royal Castle in Warsaw.