Somewhere, dear coffin, is the graveside at
Whose side we’ll squat with utmost eagerness
And, while a worn-out raincoat covers us,
Will there conduct a chat most intimate.
[Stanisław Grochowiak, Minuet]
“Undressing from Sleep“ blurs the line between stage design and performance, unfolding through gestures and objects. Set in the Polish countryside, the show narrative challenges the romanticized myth of a “merry, idyllic village” upheld by urban fantasies. Instead, it reveals a bubbling, conflicted social fabric beneath the surface, a subconscious field of tensions and contradictions. It is ancestral land seen through a magnifying glass. Władysław Hasior and Daniel Rycharski exorcise collective fears and traumas, pull skeletons out of the closet — one even steps out of it — and confront both commodified folklore and Christian sacredness, while playing with national iconography. They also give voice to forgotten and excluded actors: ghosts and spirits, criminals and heroes, members of the LGBTQ+ community and outsiders, national bards and outsider artists, Jews and refugees, lords and peasants. All these spectres return — not only to demand their rights but perhaps even more importantly, to propose an alternative vision of the past and, consequently, a different present.
During the Galician peasant uprising, as the bodies of noblemen swelled in ditches, villagers held funerals for serfdom. Manor account books were placed in wooden coffins and buried in cemeteries with full ceremony. Windows were shuttered, candles lit. What is unseen hurts less. In those days, death — like the peasants — carried a scythe: both an instrument of murder and a symbol of exploitation, for harvests and carnivals alike.
Hasior liked to compare his artistic practice to that of a gravedigger. His sculptures, unearthed and inspired by anthropoid graves, were exhumed corpses — bodies neither alive nor dead, burning, merging again with the earth, provoking with their raw expression. Rycharski creates a coffin for them — and other corpses — called “The Dead Class.”
He lays to rest in it the culture of the peasantry which, as Andrzej Mencwel wrote, no longer exists — vanished along with small farms, surviving today only as an open-air museum adorned with picturesque decorations. In this sense, the coffin is also a closet, filled with both historical and imagined costumes of the countryside, dreamt up in a trance of peasantophilia — and from which, like a nightmare, LGBT emerges, to the horror of the conservative community. It is a space of transgression, where everything is relived once more, where shame catches up with us again.
Matter decays, decomposes, dies — but it also carries meaning. In other words, the materials used to create these works have stories of their own. Like the bread baked from flour harvested in Smarżowa, from a field where Jakub Szela’s house once stood; the clothes left behind by refugees in the mountains; or the comb lost in a garden by a Jewish woman, which later became part of his first assemblage. The remnants of agricultural equipment from fallen farms, haunting with their expressive and predatory forms, or plastic toy soldiers used by children to play war.
Trigger warning: this village is strange. Just as the spirits emerge from the coffin, the audience steps into the phantasm, passing through a gate commemorating yet another anniversary of serfdom. Here, we undress not only ourselves, but the myth itself. Jakub Szela dances at a gay wedding, staining guests’ clothes with his bloody hands; blue blood flows from faucets; quasi-Gothic stained glass windows show slaughtered noblemen staring back at us; bread groans; coins glisten in pig troughs; and the Good Thief grins down on us from a banner. We finally look at them: a gay Catholic praying the rosary of Xanax pills, rolling them between his fingers; a shy scout, the illegitimate son of a village laundress, who builds a small chained dog from twigs and roots found in the forest.
Hasior and Rycharski are artists whose work is inextricably linked to their biographies. Rycharski — an artist from Kurówek fighting against rural prejudice — became the subject of the film ”All Our Fears,” while Hasior — a poor boy from Krasne Potockie who experienced social advancement thanks to a change in the political system — was the protagonist of a propaganda book. Their stories are linked by revolution. Hasior is a hero of social transformation who, as Andrzej Leder writes, experiences these changes alongside society ”as if in a dream,” and a chronicler of a modernizing countryside. Rycharski, meanwhile, is a visionary who exhumes corpses and strives to spark his own revolution amid the ruins of peasant culture. He strips away trivial romanticism, dead traditions, and national sanctities. Like Wyspiański, he sets fire to the church, the castle, and the grave, waking us from our trance-like dream.
The title of the exhibition references a poem by Stanisław Grochowiak— ”Undressing into Sleep,” which takes place inside a coffin, as well as to Hasior’s works of the same title. “Undressing” evokes eroticism, but also suggests deconstruction, while “sleep” implies a state of rest where the subject still perceives — though beyond conscious awareness. In this state, both the living and the dead appear, along with repressed traumas and hidden desires. The dialogue that Rycharski conducts with Hasior — his imagination as well as his mythologized biography — becomes a way of reckoning with sins, confronting resentments, and revisiting a history written by the ruling class. It is a critical reading, where what Hasior leaves unsaid becomes as important as what he expresses. Perhaps because he is simply ashamed? In one of his works, Rycharski quotes Tischner: “You must be yourself, because if you become someone else, they’ll end up saving that other person—not you.”
Daniel Rycharski (b. 1986) primarily works with sculptural installations. The artist examines the points of convergence and conflict between faith, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ identity. His practice often involves collaboration with agricultural societies and activist circles. In 2016, he received the Polityka Passport award. In 2021, his life story inspired the film “All Our Fears,” directed by Łukasz Ronduda and Łukasz Gutt, which received multiple awards at the 46th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, including the Golden Lions for Best Film. He designed the set for the play “Spartacus,” directed by Jakub Skrzywanek at the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. Rycharski lives in Kurówek and teaches at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. He is represented by Gunia Nowik Gallery.
Władysław Hasior (1928–1999) – sculptor, painter, and set designer — one of the most important and original figures in postwar Polish art. He created expressive assemblages and spatial installations using found objects, combining the sacred and the profane, pathos and irony. He incorporated elements of folk art, spirituality, myth, and national symbolism, using them to deliver critical and thought-provoking reflections on both history and present-day issues. Hasior was closely associated with Zakopane, where he ran his own gallery at the local Tatra Museum. His works — now held in major art collections — have been exhibited widely in Poland and abroad, including at the São Paulo and Venice Biennales.
