Polish Modernism at Milan: Linen, hemp, wood shavings : DesignWanted

Isn’t something quietly radical about placing a Polish Modernist exhibition on the sixteenth floor of Torre Velasca – a building that Milan’s architectural establishment spent decades arguing about, unsure whether to love or dismiss? A choice that can look either accidental or perfectly calibrated – but either way, it works. Because Polish Modernism, as its claim, A Struggle for Beauty, makes legible, was never comfortable in canonical spaces, but emerged, as Irena Krzywicka wrote in 1948, from linen, hemp, wood shavings – so, from material scarcity that forced a different kind of intelligence, by the intelligence of necessity. And necessity, historically, produces more interesting design than comfort ever has.

What the Visteria Foundation has done, with Polish Modernism curated by Anna Maga and Federica Sala, in Milan in 2026 – following its well-received debut at the previous design week with Romantic Brutalism: A Journey into Polish Craft and Design – is refusing a linear reading of a territory and of a movement, because history of design and culture of design, with Modernism in it, is not a timeline, is a gesture, one that resurfaces cyclically, contracts into austerity, then expands again toward ornament, then contracts again.

Polish Modernism – a Struggle for Beauty, ©Visteria Foundation

Polish Modernism – a Struggle for Beauty, ©Visteria Foundation

Polish Modernism – a Struggle for Beauty, ©Visteria Foundation

Polish Modernism – a Struggle for Beauty, ©Visteria Foundation

Polish Modernism – a Struggle for Beauty, ©Visteria Foundation

Zofia Wyganowska (exhibit designer), Anna Maga and Federica Sala (curators) ©Visteria Foundation, ph. Michał Łukasik

One more vintage piece beside another one, more post-modernist, defines that the modernist impulse is structurally adaptive, that it bends toward the conditions it inhabits more than imposing a fixed formal language on them. In the exhibition, designed by Polish Zofia Wyganowska Studio, this is modernism understood as methodology, not just as an aesthetic, and that distinction is not academic.

Because the design world, sometimes – particularly the version of it that convenes annually in the city – has developed a remarkable talent for reflecting only what it wants to see, where newness is performed just as innovation, sustainability performed just as material choice. 

The canon self-selects, amplifying the voices already inside the room and mistakes that amplification for cultural breadth. On the other hand, Polish Modernism, precisely because it developed under conditions of political pressure, material limitation, deliberate exclusion from European cultural exchange, built a different kind of stamina – learned to carry ambition without resources, to participate in an international conversation while operating, structurally, outside it.

So, alongside unique works on loan from the archive of the National Museum in Warsaw – including furniture by Jan Kurzątkowski, Bohdan Lachert and Teresa Kruszewska – Polish Modernism featured selected works by contemporary artists and designers whose practices reflect the legacy of modernist ideas, and who were commissioned to create new pieces specifically for the show. Among them, Mati Sipiora, Marek Bimer, Aleksandra Hyz, Monika Patuszyńska, and Małgorzata Markiewicz, as well as Tomek Rygalik, Maria Jeglińska-Adamczewska, Paweł Olszczyński, Igor Polasiak (Craftica Gallery), and Maja Ganszyniec.

Taking icons – the meblościanka (a modular wall unit, extremely popular in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, designed to optimize small living spaces), or the amerykanka (a compact, foldable sofa bed) – and asking contemporary designers not to reconstruct them but to interrogate their underlying logic, is a fundamentally different brief than revival.

It is asking: what problem was this solving, and is that problem still alive? And, in most cases, it is – the convertible armchair exists because living space was compressed, because a single room had to perform multiple functions across a single day. That condition has not disappeared; it has, in many cities, intensified. The design system tends not to address this, because the design system is oriented toward the consumer with discretionary space and discretionary income – and, in Polish Modernism, it showed.

“In a world of dizzying growth, where production has become overproduction, or production that is no longer sustainable, what does it mean today to be modern? What are the needs of a modern society? These are the questions the exhibition seeks to raise, asking whether today it may not be the decorative arts, or more broadly the applied arts, that are more modern precisely because they are more human, representing the ultimate territory of spiritual, aesthetic, and material research, free from the temporal laws of productivity,” says Federica Sala.

This question, that Sala poses, is structural: if the applied arts are tethered to use, to the body, to the rhythms of actual daily life, does that make them more modern than the objects celebrated as such? Design, in its most diffused idea, has never had the luxury of pure concept – it has to work. But, therefore, working – meant as functioning within constraint, serving a human need, surviving time without becoming obsolete – is something that much contemporary design quietly sidesteps.

Time, in Polish Modernism, is structural, and the arc from interwar functionalism through postwar resistance through contemporary reinterpretation is a conversation that keeps returning to the same set of questions, each generation answering them with the materials and the politics available to it. 

That is what a trajectory looks like when it is honest, not like a line moving forward, but more like a series of returns that are never quite the same return. The struggle for beauty, as the title frames it, was a struggle for a place at the common table – and that, too, has not been resolved.