Works Exhibited

Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Great Mission Inside My Brain), 2014. Electroplated embroidery thread, cotton and polyester embroidery floss, healing crystals, minerals, ceramic beads and glue on linen over canvas, steel, 38 × 38 inches (96.5 × 96.5 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Bum-Bah-Clot), 2013. Ink and gesso on canvas, 3 ¾ × 3 ¾ inches (9.5 × 9.5 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Hanky Panky), 2012. Pottery, mortar on masonry board, and aluminum, 28 ⅝ × 24 ½ × 9 ⅞ inches (72.7 × 62.2 × 25.1 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Natassia), 2012. Wood pencil shavings and Plexiglas with an adhesive film in a gold leaf frame, 27 ¼ × 41 ¼ × 2 ⅞ inches (69.2 × 104.8 × 7.3 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge Tail Lights), 1998. Chromogenic print mounted under Plexiglas, 2 panels: 40 ¼ × 40 ¼ inches each (102.2 × 102.2 cm)
Thumbnail - PIOTR UKLAŃSKI Untitled (Dance Floor), 1996. Plexiglass, colored lightbulbs, raised floor structure Dimensions variable Installation at Gavin Brown Enterprise, Broome Street, New York, October 1996
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański The Nazis, 1998 (detail). Gelatin silver and chromogenic prints, in 164 parts, each: 14 × 10 inches (35.6 × 25.4 cm) © Piotr Uklański
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (The Bomb), 2004. Gouache on Lanaquarelle paper collage, torn and pasted on plywood, 132 × 120 inches (335.3 × 304.8 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (GingerAss), 2003. Color photograph, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Ioannes Paulus PP.II Karol Wojtyla), 2004. Color photograph, 78 ¾ × 68 ⅞ inches (200 × 174.9 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Skull), 2000. Platinum print, 14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 27.9 cm)
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Curators of 50esima Esposizione Internazionale de della Biennae di Venezia, from left: Igor Zabel, Hou Hanru, Catherine David, Gilane Tawadros, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Francesco Bonami, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gabriel Orozco, Daniel Birnbaum, Massimiliano Gioni), 2003. Blue board print on vinyl banner, Dimensions variable
Thumbnail - Piotr Uklański Untitled (Kamikaze), 2004. Mosaic with porcelain tableware and polyton kombi light compound, Dimensions variable

About

Piotr Uklański was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1968. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw and photography at Cooper Union, New York.

Uklański emerged on the New York art scene in the mid-1990s with the emblematic work Untitled (Dance Floor)—a sculpture that integrates the legacy of minimalism with popular entertainment. Dividing his time between New York and Warsaw, he exploits multiple media (sculpture, photography, collage, performance, and film) and promiscuously absorbs diverse cultural references.

Uklański's willingness to take on potentially controversial subjects draws polemical reactions. His photographic series Untitled (The Nazis) caused protests when exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London in 1998, and was destroyed in a publicity stunt staged by a celebrated Polish actor while on view at Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw in 2000. Installed on a Warsaw street, his billboard Untitled (John Paul II), on the other hand, was adopted by the public as a memorial shrine following the Pope's death in 2005.

Uklański's work has been collected and exhibited by museums worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; François Pinault Foundation, Venice; and Kunsthalle Basel. In 2006, Uklański debuted his first feature-length film, Summer Love: The First Polish Western. Recent museum exhibitions include "Piotr Uklański: A Retrospective," Wiener Secession, Vienna (2007); "The Joy of Photography," Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (2007–08); "Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection," Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2009–11); "Piotr Uklański: Forty and Four," Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2012–13); Piotr Uklański: ESL," Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2013-14); and "Piotr Uklański," Dallas Contemporary (2014). His work was included in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); the 26th São Paulo Biennale (2004); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial

"Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs," the first survey of Uklański's photographic work, was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2015. An installation of photographs selected by Uklański from the museum's collection accompanied the exhibition.

The recent publication Second Languages: Reading Piotr Uklański (Miami: Hatje Cantz and Bass Museum of Art, 2013) features eleven richly illustrated essays that explore the diverse aspects of Uklański's oeuvre, while examining the varied conceptual currents running throughout it. Second Languages: Reading Piotr Uklański is edited by Donna Wingate and Marc Joseph Berg.

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Exhibitions

Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklański
Floored

November 6, 2013–January 10, 2014

Geneva

Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklański
Midsummer Night’s Dream

December 21, 2011–January 31, 2012

Eden Rock—St. Barts

Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklański
Discharge!

January 12–February 19, 2011

980 Madison Avenue, New York

Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklański
Brut

June 11–July 24, 2009

Davies Street, London

Piotr Uklański

Piotr Uklański
BIAŁO-CZERWONA

March 27–May 31, 2008

West 21st Street, New York

See all Exhibitions for Piotr Uklański

From the Quarterly

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. The show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting.

Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism

Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism

Francis Bacon lived and worked in Paris for a decade starting in the mid-1970s. The city and the art he encountered there provided a profound backdrop for his austere late style, which often brings together smooth, colorful backgrounds, spare architectural signifiers, and sculptural human forms. Here, three striking paintings from that period are considered by Sebastian Smee.

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil

An exhibition at Gagosian, Hong Kong, brings together three of James Turrell’s Glasswork pieces along with site plans, photographs, and models of his Skyspaces and Roden Crater. Here, Alice Godwin explores the history of the Glassworks and their relationship to the artist’s wider practice.

Divine Emanations: Nymphs, Poets, and the Painter’s Palette

Divine Emanations: Nymphs, Poets, and the Painter’s Palette

Janne Sirén considers Anselm Kiefer’s new paintings, the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, entitled Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still.

Derrick Adams: View Master

Derrick Adams: View Master

On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.

A Tremendous Generosity: Jeff Koons on Marcel Duchamp

A Tremendous Generosity: Jeff Koons on Marcel Duchamp

Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.

Donald Judd: Patiently Constructed

Donald Judd: Patiently Constructed

From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.

Picture Books: Mary Gaitskill & Jill Mulleady

Picture Books: Mary Gaitskill & Jill Mulleady

The most recent edition of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, pairs Mary Gaitskill’s novella STAUF: A Tragedy with Jill Mulleady’s painting The Shift. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Gaitskill and Mulleady discuss the myth of Faust, good and evil in the digital age, and the channeling of raw matter into art.

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