Labirynt Gallery

What to expect

Three addresses, no permanent display, no ticket. Labirynt is Lublin’s municipal contemporary art gallery and it works entirely on changing shows, replaced every few weeks, so this page cannot tell you what will be on the walls when you arrive. Look at the exhibition calendar on the gallery’s own site first. Each of the three venues runs its own programme and its own hours, and a hall can sit empty between two shows.

The main building at ul. ks. Popiełuszki 5 is single-storey and spreads sideways rather than upwards. Past the principal hall it holds the Foyer, the Black Room, the Edu Gallery, an education studio and a basement, with a bookshop immediately inside the door. The name is literal: getting from one room to the next means corridors and six ramps at six different angles. Writing in Dwutygodnik in January 2024, the critic Stach Szabłowski walked from a bright room painted over with graffiti straight into a darkened space of work by Ukrainian artists.

The gallery also owns a collection, assembled since the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and rated among the more important Polish holdings of neo-avant-garde art. Grupa Zamek and Jan Ziemski are in it, along with performance work by Włodzimierz Borowski and Jerzy Bereś, photo-media by Natalia LL, critical art by Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek. None of it hangs permanently: it surfaces in thematic shows, as it did in summer 2026 in “Ręce mam czyste i podłogę mam zieloną” (“My hands are clean and my floor is green”), which drew nearly a hundred works from the store.

Worth the 20 to 25 minute walk out of the Old Town if you follow contemporary art, or if you want a free hour indoors when Lublin turns wet. If you came to Poland for history, spend the hour at Lublin Castle instead. Do not plan the trip around a single famous object, because there is no single famous object here on any given week.

Tips

• Allow 45 to 60 minutes for one show at Popiełuszki 5. The gallery publishes no figure of its own; this is our estimate from the size of the building. Double it if you stay for a workshop or an artist talk.
• Free entry, no ticket, nothing to book. City culture listings still quote 8/4 PLN; the gallery’s own visitor page states that admission to the exhibitions is free. Some events are charged, the exhibitions are not.
• English on site is not guaranteed. The gallery publishes every exhibition text in Polish, English and Ukrainian on its website, but says nothing about the language of the wall labels. Read the exhibition page on your phone before you go in; openings are held in Polish.
• Wednesday 15:00-19:00 is the calm slot. During those silent hours every work that emits loud sound or flashing light is switched off, for visitors who are sensitive to noise or on the autism spectrum. On other days the same pieces play at full volume.
• The access kit is free and lives in the bookshop. A wheelchair and noise-cancelling headphones are lent for the length of your visit, and assistance dogs get a water bowl. Portable neck loops exist - six of them - but must be requested by e-mail in advance.
• The ticket desk and the basement defeat a wheelchair. The ramp to the desk is far too steep, stairs lead down to the cellar, there is no lift and no cloakroom. The exhibition halls themselves are laid out so that a wheelchair passes freely between the partitions.
• Ask for help at least two days ahead. Support during an event is arranged by e-mail; an assistant who will meet you at the bus stop and walk you in is arranged by phone, extension 23.

Getting there

On foot: about 20 to 25 minutes west of the Old Town, roughly two kilometres, through the Wieniawa district. Bus: lines 2, 8, 13, 15, 55 and 303, all of them low-floor; the stops are called Galeria Labirynt 01, 02 and 04, plus Głowackiego 01 and 02. From Galeria Labirynt 01 and 02 the crossings to the door have both light and sound signals; the gallery says nothing about stop 04. Bike: Lublin City Bike station 6921 on ul. Poniatowskiego. By car: the car park under the building is free for gallery visitors, entered from ul. Popiełuszki, with one blue-badge bay. A strip of gravel between the car park and the pavement makes wheelchair access awkward.

Nearby

The gallery’s second address at ul. Grodzka 3 stands beside the Grodzka Gate. That makes the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre and its account of Jewish Lublin the obvious pairing, and it is the other institution in this city that treats a building as its medium. Five minutes uphill, the National Museum in Lublin at Lublin Castle supplies the counterweight: old painting and city history where Labirynt gives you the present tense. For a twenty-minute stop, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin inside the Kraków Gate explains the streets you have been walking.

Background

The institution dates itself to 1956, when the Bureau of Art Exhibitions (BWA) opened in Lublin at ul. Narutowicza 4. The name arrived later and from outside. Andrzej Mroczek ran the first Galeria Labirynt at the Lublin House of Culture from 1974, and when he took over the BWA in 1981 he moved his programme into it. Under martial law the Lublin BWA was one of very few state institutions that Poland’s independent artists did not boycott. Waldemar Tatarczuk, founder of the Performance Art Centre, became director in 2010 and renamed BWA to Labirynt; Barbara Sawicka has run the gallery since March 2026. Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Michael Snow, Władysław Hasior, Mirosław Bałka and Joanna Rajkowska have all shown here.