Jacek Antoni Zieliński

A small corridor display at Lublin Castle, one of 38 gift presentations with which the National Museum in Lublin marks its 120th year. This time the donor is the artist himself: a Warsaw painter who treats a photograph as a ground to paint on rather than a finished image. The museum publishes no English text on the jubilee displays, so the quotation below is our translation of its Polish description.

National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

In his work Jacek Antoni Zieliński turned to photography, treating it as a ground for painterly intervention. In 2024 the artist gave the National Museum in Lublin works from the cycles “And the wave of light unfolds…” and “Eight Inventions on the Theme of the Wave”. The display presents a selection of the works donated by the artist.

What to expect

This is not a show in its own room. The works hang in the corridor beside the Gallery of Orthodox Icon Painting, on the route through the permanent exhibitions. The museum does not say how many pieces are on view, and it calls them a “selection” from two cycles, so expect a handful to a dozen or so works rather than a survey.

Both cycles circle one motif, the wave. Each piece starts as a photograph with paint laid over it, and the pleasure of the display is looking closely to see where the print ends and the brushwork begins.

The same corridor also holds a poster display drawn from gifts by Krzysztof Dydo, Alfred Hałasa and Dorota Folga-Januszewska, until 1 November 2026. The Zamek Group and Avant-garde gallery shows paintings by Tomasz Zawadzki from the same jubilee series, and from 2 October the hall outside the Gallery of 19th- and 20th-Century Polish Painting adds prints from the Irena Hochman and Tadeusz Mysłowski collection, also until 15 November.

Context

Jacek Antoni Zieliński was born in Warsaw in 1936 and studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts from 1954 to 1960. His diploma was in printmaking under Tadeusz Kulisiewicz, but he names the colourist painter Stanisław Szczepański as his real teacher. He also writes about art; his treatise on painting, “Spojrzenie i obraz” (“The Gaze and the Image”), came out from the Warsaw publisher PIW in 2025.

He is a few years younger than the painters of the 1955 Arsenal exhibition in Warsaw, the landmark show of the generation that studied under Socialist Realism, and he spent years collecting their work. From 1978 to 2002 he ran the “Krąg Arsenału” gallery at the regional museum in Gorzów Wielkopolski, in western Poland. He showed the wave cycle there as early as 1993, at the town’s BWA gallery; the title comes from Apollinaire. Reviewing that show in the local paper “Ziemia Gorzowska”, Gabriela Balcerzakowa wrote that this is not abstract painting but landscape, built from tiny patches of colour that read as a stream of light.

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket. The museum’s price list does not mention the jubilee displays, and the corridor sits beside one of the permanent galleries, so the permanent-exhibitions ticket, 20 PLN (reduced 15 PLN), gets you in. That is our reading of the location; the museum does not say it in so many words. The combined ticket for the permanent exhibitions, the chapel and the tower costs 40 PLN (reduced 30 PLN) and is sold only at the museum’s ticket desk.

Ignore the old dates. As late as June 2026 the museum announced this display for 6 November 2026 - 3 January 2027. The current schedule moves it to 22 September - 15 November 2026, and from 17 November the corridor goes to a display of Lublin-born and Lublin-based artists. If you see the winter dates anywhere, they are out of date.

Hours follow the permanent exhibitions. Until 30 September (summer season): Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-18:00, Friday and Saturday 9:00-19:00. From 1 October to the end of the run (winter season): Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-17:00, Friday and Saturday 9:00-18:00. The permanent exhibitions are closed on Mondays, so do not come for this display then. Free-admission days do not fall on a fixed weekday: the museum announces them month by month on its visitor-information page (Polish), and they cover the permanent exhibitions but not the tower.

Allow 15 minutes. The display alone is not a reason to make the trip up the castle hill, but it is a good stop on the way through the painting galleries.

English on site: the museum’s English-language pages cover visiting information only and say nothing about English labels for the jubilee displays. Guided tours of the permanent exhibitions in English are available for groups of up to 30, at 250 PLN per group plus admission, booked at least a week ahead through edukacja@mnwl.pl .

Who it is for: anyone interested in photography reworked with paint, in landscape reduced to light and moving water, or in the heirs of Polish colourist painting. Who can skip it: a visitor with an hour at the castle who wants the Holy Trinity Chapel and Matejko’s “Union of Lublin”; do not put a corridor display ahead of those.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - the museum profile: the chapel with its 1418 frescoes, the keep and nine permanent exhibitions, including the Gallery of Orthodox Icon Painting beside which this display hangs.
• Posters gifted by Dydo, Hałasa and Folga-Januszewska - the jubilee poster display in the same corridor, until 1 November 2026; you see both in one walk.
• Tomasz Zawadzki - matter painting from the same series of gifts, in the Zamek Group and Avant-garde gallery until 3 January 2027.
• Tamara Lempicka - Beyond Borders - another show at the castle built on a recent acquisition, this time a purchase rather than a gift; separate ticket, 40 PLN.

The full jubilee schedule is on the museum’s jubilee displays page (Polish only), and prices are on its ticket page .

Museum profile: National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) .