The Stone and His Boy
Artist: Mateusz Szabłowski
Curator: Kamil Kuitkowski
Private View: Thursday 15th October, 5pm - 8:30pm
Exhibition Open: Thursday 15th - Monday 26th October
Opening hours: Daily, 11am-5pm
Location: Gallery 2
Mateusz Szabłowski’s exhibition The Stone and His Boy considers the journey not simply as movement through space, but as a process of reconstructing identity through the memory of places, objects and images. The exhibition invokes the tradition of the Grand Tour—a journey historically conceived as formative for Europe’s elites—while reversing its established logic. Rather than affirming the metropolitan centre, it turns towards the periphery, the provinces and experiences displaced from official narratives. The exhibition’s title playfully references the fifth volume of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, The Horse and His Boy.
The eponymous stones, together with masks, textiles and objects, function within this narrative not as props but as companions and guides. Painting, objects and textiles thus become more than records of a journey: they are also its consequences—the material outcomes of experiences that acquire agency in their own right. In Szabłowski’s practice, objects lead, observe and retain histories.
Queer experience and the artist’s Central and Eastern European background provide further key points of reference. Szabłowski suggests that relations between centre and periphery are not confined to the histories of empires and distant colonies. They are also produced at close range: through language, the gaze, social hierarchies, experiences of not belonging and the desire for recognition. Within this framework, contemporary queer practices that bring marginalised subjects, narratives and forms into dominant cultural circuits converge with, and at times become indistinguishable from, decolonial strategies.
The artist constructs his own inventory of faces, traces and forms—at once personal and appropriated from found histories. Through acts of collecting, framing and displaying, he reconfigures the conditions of looking: that which is conventionally positioned as an object of an external gaze is brought into proximity with the viewer.
The Stone and His Boy marks the conclusion of one stage in Szabłowski’s ongoing journey. Installed in a former handbag factory in London’s Vauxhall, the exhibition takes the form of the private room of an artist-traveller-collector: part personal archive, part cabinet of curiosities, deliberately exposed to view through a dandyistic gesture of self-fashioning and display.
Vauxhall is not a neutral setting within this constellation. The area occupies an important place in London’s queer cultural history, shaped by drag, cabaret, performance and club culture, including the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and the clubs established beneath the railway arches. It is also home to the world’s oldest interplanetary society. Today, Vauxhall is a site in which different social, economic, historical and cultural orders coexist and intersect.
The choice of Vauxhall as one of the “milestones” of Szabłowski’s artistic journey is therefore deliberate. Warsaw’s Foksal Street—an important site in the history of the Polish avant-garde—takes its name from a Polonised form of “Vauxhall”. The name derives from an eighteenth-century pleasure garden and site of public entertainment established in Warsaw after the model of London’s celebrated Vauxhall Gardens.
Szabłowski’s journey thus traces an unexpected line between the Polish interior, Warsaw and London. In doing so, it destabilises distinctions between centre and periphery, the local and the global. The journey does not lead towards a mythical “elsewhere”; instead, it becomes a means of attending more closely to that which has been rendered peripheral, overlooked or silent.
The exhibition is presented as part of the Poland Now festival, organised by the ARTE Foundation, and co-financed by the Senate of the Republic of Poland. The event is produced by the No Title Foundation. The exhibition partner is the Polish Cultural Institute in London.
Mateusz Szabłowski
Born 2000. Studied at the Faculty of Graphic Arts, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2020–2025). His practice is primarily grounded in painting. He also works in printmaking and produces objects in a range of materials that extend and complement his painterly investigations.