For Art Warsaw Villa Róz 2026 Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a transhistorical dialogue between Paul Beumer and Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024). The presentation juxtaposes Paul Beumer's latest textile works for which he used the traditional batik technique with works from the 1990s by Jacqueline de Jong that she made on sailcloth.
Villa Róz is the latest edition of the international art fair organized by Art Warsaw, taking place in the 19th-century palace at Aleja Róż 1 in Warsaw, Poland.
Maintaining an intimate scale and a strong focus on artistic quality, the fair will host 56 contemporary art galleries. The initiative expands on the successful model of earlier Art Warsaw projects such as Art Warsaw Miodowa 2025 and NADA Villa Warsaw 2024 and 2025, all achieving exceptional attendance and receiving widespread acclaim across the press and social media.
Art Warsaw showcases leading galleries from Poland and Central and Eastern Europe, and couples them with a thoughtful selection of galleries from around the world. The fair serves as a platform for artistic voices that have for years operated outside the dominant Western-centric market, and are now drawing rising attention from collectors, curators, and institutions.
A signature characteristic of Art Warsaw lies in its embedding of contemporary art within unconventional architectural spaces across the city. Departing from neutral white-cube spaces, Art Warsaw events settle into the living, breathing fabric of the city – abandoned palaces, former hospitals, and embassies. We are interested in how contemporary art interacts with these settings and reveals new layers of meaning to the public.
Villa Róż is an eclectic city palace designed by Józef Huss and erected in 1876. Its facades, dominated by Neo-Renaissance forms, harmoniously integrate into the most representative part of Warsaw, situated in the immediate vicinity of the Ujazdowski Park, the Royal Łazienki Gardens, the Centre for Contemporary Art, and numerous government premises.
For decades, the palace served as the British Embassy and has remained almost entirely intact since the building was vacated by the diplomatic mission. Its distinctive functional layout combines representative, palatial interiors with a maze-like system of office spaces along with a peculiar Cold War ambience of levels formerly reserved solely for intelligence operations. The building still houses, among other features, an armory, reinforced safe-rooms, and other mysterious spaces and equipment.
The architecture of the Palace combines 19th-century luxury with the cold, bureaucratic atmosphere of a British diplomatic mission operating in the context of a communist state. We believe that this multilayered setting stands as a vital and enriching backdrop for the exhibited works, providing an intriguing experience for visitors exploring the palace filled with relics of history, political isolation, and the mechanisms of control.
