The Piana Gallery Foundation is a community-based cultural institution and artist-run space based in Kraków, dedicated to mapping, supporting, and promoting the most recent developments in contemporary visual arts. Its programme places particular emphasis on Kraków’s art scene, with a focus on young, emerging, and debuting artists, while situating local artistic practices within a broader national and international context.
Piana functions as an exhibition, curatorial, educational, and research-oriented space. Its activities include a regular exhibition programme, meetings, lectures, guided tours, performative events, publishing projects, and long-term collaboration with artists. The foundation understands the exhibition not only as a presentation of artworks, but also as a medium in itself: a spatial, social, and intellectual situation in which new relationships emerge between artists, audiences, places, and institutions.
An important part of Piana’s mission is community-building — creating an environment based on collaboration, trust, and the exchange of experience. The foundation operates from the grassroots level, combining the energy of an independent artistic initiative with a professional curatorial programme and a sense of institutional responsibility. As a community-based cultural institution, Piana provides a space for experimentation, artistic debuts, dialogue, and critical reflection on art, as well as on community, memory, urban space, ecology, and contemporary forms of social life.
The foundation also develops residency and international exchange programmes. Projects such as FLUX, an artistic residency and exchange between Leipzig and Kraków, as well as collaborations with artists and institutions from Austria, Hungary, Germany, and other countries, allow Piana to introduce the local scene into international circulation and to invite artists from outside Poland to work in Kraków. Piana’s residency-based activities often lead to the creation of new works developed specifically in response to the context of the city, the architecture of the gallery, and local social relations.
Collaboration with cultural and educational institutions is another essential aspect of Piana’s programme. The foundation has worked with, among others, the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the Utopia Home – International Empathy Centre, international partners, organisations supporting Polish-German exchange, and institutions promoting Polish culture abroad. Piana’s presence in programmes such as Cracow Art Week / KRAKERS and Warsaw Gallery Weekend demonstrates that the foundation operates both locally and beyond the local context: as an important point on Kraków’s art map and as an active participant in the wider field of contemporary art.
Piana is co-created by Michał Sroka, Michał Zawada, Filip Rybkowski, and Agnieszka Doniec — practitioners active in the fields of art, curating, education, and the organisation of artistic life. Their experience includes artistic practice, academic work, exhibition-making, exhibition design, institutional collaboration, and the development of new formats for presenting contemporary art. As a result, the Piana Gallery Foundation is not only a gallery, but also a site for the production of knowledge, relationships, and new models of cultural practice.
Since its establishment, Piana has consistently built a space for contemporary art that combines institutional professionalism with the flexibility of an independent initiative. Its programme is developed around exhibitions, residencies, international cooperation, and community-based work, making it a lasting, recognisable, and necessary presence on the cultural map of Kraków.
