When it comes to the apartment, the presence of the line encourages the eye to move around the space, drinking it all in. ‘As the blue Scotch tape line is different and surprising, we notice it,’ Aleksandra suggests. ‘We notice the things on which it runs, so it describes the world around us.’ There it is streaking across the windows of the apartment, with their Daniel Buren stripes. There it is again, dancing across the tie of his friend, fellow artist and former housemate Henryk Stażewski, in a photograph lovingly stuck up on one of the walls. It’s a vibrant, dynamic shock of blue drawing the viewer in to an otherwise static environment. It reminds us that life happened here.
Krasiński’s was not the only life lived out in this space, however. Poland’s communist government ‘wanted to show how modern they were, so they used contemporary art, abstract art, to build this kind of propaganda’, Aleksandra explains. State architects were instructed to include studios in otherwise nondescript blocks, which the Artists’ Association assigned to practising artists. Stażewski, an established figure in the Polish art scene, was given the apartment in 1962 and instigated a well-attended salon there. It was a place of freedom and exchange, a welcome antidote to a grey period of history. A few years later, Krasiński, an active participant in these gatherings, moved in.
Just in front of the cupboards stands the upended frame of the bed in which painter Henryk Stażewski slept when he shared the apartment. His flatmate repurposed it as a frame for a poster advertising the aforementioned solo exhibition at the Zachęta
When Stażewski died in 1988, all his works and personal belongings were given to the national museum and the studio was left empty. Krasiński arranged his own work around the studio but made sure to keep the physical remains of his friend’s presence, right down to nails in the walls, metal strings on which Stażewski’s paintings had hung, and the shadows that said paintings left on the walls. These ‘layers of time, of history’ remain to this day.