Reading is a long-duration performance by Paweł Althamer and Artur Żmijewski, accompanying and simultaneously inaugurating their joint exhibition It’s Time for Us. 

During the performance, the artists sit opposite one another and collectively “read” selected books in close detail — an old anatomical atlas, Birth Atlas, and an album devoted to the Sistine Chapel — while covering their pages with drawings, comments, and painterly interventions. Here, the act of reading becomes a form of visual conversation and mutual observation, in which knowledge, image, and intuition overlap to create a new, multilayered narrative. The work produced during the performance will subsequently become part of the exhibition as a record of process, time, and the relationship between the artists.

Paweł Althamer and Artur Żmijewski are among the most internationally recognized Polish artists. They studied together at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and have remained in contact since the 1990s, frequently collaborating following the completion of their studies. Since 2017, the artists have practiced a form of drawing-based conversation addressing subjects that are easier to create around than to discuss directly, while simultaneously allowing them to detach from their individual artistic practices. In both cases, their work is associated with critically engaged art; however, as a duo, they allow themselves a freer, more playful visual language in which mistakes are welcomed and no definitive conclusions are sought.

For their hybrid painterly-collage works, the artists use old books: photography and landscape albums, historical sculpture catalogues, and atlases of human and animal anatomy. Through these materials, Althamer and Żmijewski engage in a kind of poetic — at times almost shamanic — exchange, constructing multilayered images composed of fragments, quotations, and traces of reality. The exhibition Our Time Has Come is another outcome of this dialogue, in which recurring motifs include the body, the nude, annihilation, and the observation of culture. This time, however, the focus shifts toward observing one another, resulting in double self-portraits that function as reconstructed interpretations of the soul.

When: Saturday, 16 May 2026, 4:30–8:30 PM
Where: Krupa Art Foundation, Rynek 27/28
Free admission.