Poland enjoys artistic renaissance 24 years after communism

Poland enjoys artistic renaissance 24 years after communism: Young artists command higher prices as more affluent Poles revive tradition of collecting works - Kate Connolly in Warsaw, guardian.co.uk. Via MC on Facebook

Tending the plants on the rooftop terrace garden of her studio in a former army housing block in central Warsaw, Anna Szprynger is taking a well-earned a break from her meticulous line drawings.

Despite critical acclaim, the artist made paltry sums for the first few years of her career, able to survive only thanks to money scraped together by her father.

"The trouble is after so many years of dictatorship that there is no tradition of an art market in Poland," said the 30-year-old. "People respect you if you're an artist, but they expect you to lead the existence of a starving pauper and they don't tend to buy the art."

But now international art critics are increasingly turning their attention to Poland, and talking about Warsaw as the new artistic hub of central Europe with the enthusiasm and excitement once reserved solely for Berlin.

Recently one of Szprynger's geometric line drawings sold for 30,000 zloty (£6,000), to the CEO of a Polish construction company, a sum she admitted finding "embarrassingly high" and a markup of around 75 times what her works were selling for just a couple of years ago.

The auction house that sold the work, Abbey House, puts the price hike down to the fact that the art market is now growing at around 20-30% a year, as disposable income rises and the hunger for Polish art is expanding.

On Monday, Szprynger will experience another milestone in her nascent career when her art goes on show at the Saatchi Gallery in London along with that of 14 other Polish artists.

Seven of them, including Szprynger, represent a new wave of young Polish artists making their mark on the country's modern art scene which, while having been free from the shackles of communism for the past 24 years, has nevertheless until now been sorely constrained by Poland's lack of a mature art market.

Szprynger found herself thrust into the limelight after Abbey House, a fine art auctioneer startup in Warsaw, took her under its wing in 2010. In return for a modest monthly salary of around 4,000 zloty (£800) – around 25% above the average Polish wage – she now produces a set number of works for them each month.

"More than two decades after the end of communism, we're still not very good at promotion of artists, and the art gallery scene can be very brutal," said Szprynger. "But now I've not only got someone promoting me but I'm freed up to concentrate exclusively on my art, while they place me fairly and squarely in the art market and for the first time I can imagine a future for myself as an artist."

Szprynger's obvious hope is that at the end of her five-year contract, prices for her works will have retained their value or that she can at the very least continue to make a respectable living from her art.

She refers to what is known in Polish art circles as "Efekt Sasnal" – referring to the painter Wilhelm Sasnal, currently the most expensive living Polish artist, whose works typically sell for several hundred thousand dollars at international auction, who rose to prominence after being "discovered" by Saatchi. The 2009 Turbine Hall debut of the Warsaw-born sculptor Miroslaw Balka also serves as huge inspiration, and prompted interest in Polish art to soar, she added.

But some on the Polish art scene have accused Abbey House of skewing the market by hiking prices to unrealistic levels, and talk of a bubble that will ultimately burst, damaging the artists. The auction house insists it is quite simply patronising a worthy set of young creatives and shaping a market for them that has barely existed until now, but is steadily on the rise.

"It's important for artists to at least have the chance to make a living from their art, rather than seeing something go at auction for a trifle," said Jakub Kokoszka, one of the founders of Abbey House. "Until now too few have had that opportunity." The result is that many artists have left Poland.

He points to the numbers of Poles increasingly keen to leave an inheritance for their children "after years under communism when you were lucky if you ended up with a silver sugar bowl or a wardrobe", who are taking a keen interest in art, as well as the strong sense of patriotism that is driving growing numbers to take a closer look at modern Polish artists.

The 2013 report on art and finance by the professional service firm Deloitte dedicated an entire section to the Polish art market, with its analysts suggesting that increasingly affluent Poles were slowly returning to the prewar tradition of art collecting.

Skate's, a New-York-based arts market research company, recently estimated that the country's "innovative and quickly growing art market" is now worth an annual $100m (£66m).

"The problem has been that Poles, still enjoying the relatively newfound fruits of capitalism, have preferred to buy a car, or a second car, or a watch, than a piece of art, but that's now slowly changing," said Boguslav Deptula, a leading Polish art critic and the co-curator of the Polish Art Now exhibition at Saatchi. "They realise you can buy a nice drawing to put on your wall for the same price you might pay for a pair of fancy shoes."

According to Julia Michalska, editor at the Art Newspaper, Poland's expanding commercial gallery scene in cities such as Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and Poznan is "catering to the country's substantial middle-class collector base" that has come out of the recession relatively unscathed.

"As the local art market grows, more artists are staying in Poland, which means that more profits will remain in the country, though artist flight is still a major problem," she said.

Unfavourable conditions for artists, apart from the hitherto low art prices, include hard-to-obtain studio space and high rents. That in turn, though, has given the gallery scene what Michalska described as a "very urban feel", with galleries forced to look for creative solutions and locating themselves in old communist high-rise blocks, in factories, hotel rooms, even fire stations.

And, say culture buffs, the artistic renaissance, thanks in large part to the country's flourishing economy, has led to a cultural renaissance on many other levels. They point to projects in Warsaw by star architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, two recent major exhibitions of JMW Turner and Andy Warhol which attracted a huge audience, as well as the newly opened expansion of a wing of 20th- and 21st-century Polish art at the National Museum's Gallery of Modern Art.

Back in Szprynger's spacious flat with its majestic views over Warsaw, she and several of her young artist colleagues who will exhibit with her at the Saatchi sum up their sense of both fortune and fear.

"The Polish art world is very hermetic but my hope is as the market expands as more people become interested in art it will become a more open place," said Maciej Wieczerzak, 27, who gave up his day job at an advertising agency to concentrate on his Goya-inspired graphic art which he paints in his studio in a former beauty salon in the town of Mielec, 186 miles south of Warsaw. His works have so far earned up to £6,000, his biggest patron being a Warsaw businesswoman.

But the backlash had already begun. Agata Kleczkowska, 25, a recent graduate of Warsaw's Academy of Arts who has drawn attention for her magic-realism-inspired figurative animal portraits which deliberately teeter on the edge of kitsch, said she was horrified by the hype that followed when recently a German businessman bought her portrait of a howling reindeer against a psychedelic background for 160,000 zloty (£32,000), a staggering price by Polish standards.

"It was a very scary moment. I was quite happy to withdraw into my small flat with my dogs, while all around me critics were saying: 'That's too much, she's too young.' Hardly anyone said: 'Maybe it was worth it if someone's willing to pay that,'" she said. "I noticed then how much envy there is in the art world and what a harsh place it can be."