The official Polish-UK Season 2025 was inaugurated on 5 March 2025 with an exceptional exhibition presenting the art of the St. Ives School mixed with related pictures and sculptures of the Polish artists from the interwar and postwar periods. The Polish, British and foreign visitors could understand the cultural bond between Polish and British artists of the time. 

The displayed pictures and sculptures are mostly creations of the British artists working in Cornwall, southwestern England, during the time of the 2 World War and after. 

The works include pictures of Alfred Wallis, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Margaret Mellis, William Scott and Bryan Wynter.

The opening ceremony was attended by the British Ambassador to Poland, Anna Clunes, the head of the British Council, Scott McDonald, and the Polish Deputy Minister of Culture, Marta Cienkowska. High representatives of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Institute in London also spoke at the event. 

“Building communities every day is the most important task for Europe today. Perhaps more important than ever before because so much depends on our cooperation and sense of unity today. Culture is a force that has the unique power to shape communities across all divisions,” said Polish Deputy Minister of Culture Marta Cienkowska.

“We are facing many challenges at the moment around the world and particularly in Poland’s neighbourhood. I think there has never been a better time for the UK and Poland to create and act together, and perhaps most importantly for imagining future collaborations within culture and the arts. UK/Poland Season 2025 does just that,” said Scott McDonald, British Council CEO.

During the opening all gathered officials said they are extremely excited about first Polish-UK

British Ambassador to Poland Anna Clunes speaking at the opening ceremony.

A season that has been happening for more than 10 years (last time in 2011) and how it is important to cooperate on a cultural level to uphold other forms of relations, including those of security, with geopolitical implications in these trying times.

“The exhibition presents works by British artists associated with the milieu of St Ives, a small port town located in the westernmost part of the Cornish Peninsula in Great Britain. This milieu, bringing together artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Margaret Mellis, William Scott, and Bryan Wynter, did not constitute a formal group whose activity would be defined by a uniform programme. It was here that a specific painting and sculpture idiom was developed, derived from the abstract structures of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson’s works, an idiom in which the choice of formal solutions is more or less closely correlated with the saturation and course of the experience of the landscape,” the Łódź MS2 museum wrote in its announcement about the exhibition. 

The exhibition includes 39 works from the British Council Arts Collection, 3 works from the Tate Collection, and also those from the Museum of Art in Łódź, the National Museums in Warsaw, Poznań, Kraków and Gdańsk, as well as the Częstochowa Museum in southern Poland and other private collections.

The St. Ives School is an art history term explaining the phenomena of a group of modernist painters and sculptors who worked in and around the coastal town of St. Ives, Cornwall, particularly from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Influenced by the local sea landscape and mediterranean-like light, artists fused abstraction with organic forms. Their work often explored constructivist and geometric principles, blending European avant-garde (mostly with French influence) ideas with a deep connection to nature. 

The movement contributed significantly to British modernism and continues to inspire contemporary artists.

The exhibition takes place in the MS2 Museum in Łódź and will be available for visitors until 7 July 2025. 

You can learn more about the St. Ives School from a BBC Documentary available on YouTube.

Source: Polskie Radio, British Council

Photos: Tomasz Modrzejewski, British Poles

Tomasz Modrzejewski