Aether Commons — Azu Nwagbogu at the Gierowski Foundation

Warsaw is doing what Venice keeps announcing it will do. The Stefan Gierowski Foundation, set up in 2014 by the painter's family to look after his estate, handed the reinterpretation of that estate to Azu Nwagbogu, the Lagos curator behind LagosPhoto and the African Artists' Foundation. Twenty works, eleven artists, running May 31 to October 18 at plac Dąbrowskiego 8/11. Gierowski's canvases are distributed through the rooms as gravitational centers rather than historical anchors: a 1975 geometric painting set against Esther Mahlangu's Ndebele fields, late oils against Mona Hatoum's marbles, Andile Dyalvane and Zizipho Poswa's clay in the same argument as Olafur Eliasson's light. The claim is not that abstraction was secretly African. It is that light was never anybody's property. An estate letting an outside curator rewrite it is rarer than any single object in the room.