e4 c5
Cracow, 27.06.2026 - 27.07.2026
Artysta:
Juliusz Kosin
Kurator:
Michał Zawada
Juliusz Kosin
Kurator:
Michał Zawada
The move c5 has for decades been Black’s most popular response to the classical e4.
This is the Sicilian Defence: a chess opening that proposes an aggressive, dynamic game, one demanding a deep knowledge of theory. Despite the multitude of its variations—forming numerous branching lines, bristling with traps—it is eagerly chosen by amateurs and grandmasters alike. It appeared on European chessboards toward the end of the sixteenth century, yet it had to wait until the last century for its true flourishing, when it was developed and employed, among others, by Mieczysław Najdorf, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov. The Najdorf Variation became a powerful weapon for Beth Harmon in the celebrated The Queen’s Gambit, offering her an effective defence in the most important games.
In a series of works developed over the past two years, Juliusz Kosin transcribes grandmaster chess games into the language of geometric abstraction, transferring the notation of moves in this essentially two-dimensional game onto the surface of the canvas. The movements of the pieces are transformed here into a system of lines, creating complex arrangements that might seem entirely accidental. The ideal of flatness of the painterly medium, postulated in the 1960s by Clement Greenberg, encounters the nature of chess here in a surprising way, resulting in an amalgam of purely aesthetic experience and a fascinating transformation of intellectual contest and the depth of its tradition.
What matters in the artist’s works is therefore not only this collision of languages. By drawing on historical games from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, the paintings tell both the history of chess and the dramatic political history of the past century. This radically abstract game—like many other sporting disciplines—has repeatedly become a reflection of collective aspirations and an arena of nationalist tensions between great powers.
The earliest protagonists of Kosin’s works presented in the exhibition are Akiba Rubinstein—the prototype for the character in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense, a Polish genius of positional play, thanks to which he became one of the leading players of the first two decades of the twentieth century before his career was buried by advancing mental illness—and Marcel Duchamp, who in the 1920s abandoned avant-garde art in favour of developing a chess career, although despite several achievements he never managed to attain major international success. Kosin also pays tribute to Judit Polgár, the first female grandmaster to surpass a 2700 rating of the International Chess Federation, and to Igor Kovalenko, a Ukrainian player who returned to the game after three years spent in the trenches of the war against the Russian invasion.
Kosin deliberately reaches for key moments in chess history. The most famous duel in the history of chess may undoubtedly be considered the clash between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky during the 1972 World Championship match. The contest was watched with tension on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the American’s victory, 12.5–8.5, broke the long-standing dominance of Soviet chess players, becoming a significant moment in Cold War politics. Another radical breakthrough to which the artist refers is Kasparov’s legendary confrontation with the supercomputer Deep Blue, regarded as the moment when human players were dethroned by machines. Kasparov’s defeat initiated a new era in the history of the game: electronic chess engines, refined ever since, systematically refuted numerous openings and introduced new ideas that had previously been marginalised by grandmasters. The fragment of the encounter between Stockfish and AlphaZero captured by Kosin records a chess game at a level far beyond human cognitive capacities. In a certain sense, the moment of the chess world’s capitulation before the dispersed subjectivity of artificial intelligence may be seen as a symptom of global anxiety in the face of what is probably the greatest technological, social, and political transformation of recent centuries.
Michał Zawada
This is the Sicilian Defence: a chess opening that proposes an aggressive, dynamic game, one demanding a deep knowledge of theory. Despite the multitude of its variations—forming numerous branching lines, bristling with traps—it is eagerly chosen by amateurs and grandmasters alike. It appeared on European chessboards toward the end of the sixteenth century, yet it had to wait until the last century for its true flourishing, when it was developed and employed, among others, by Mieczysław Najdorf, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov. The Najdorf Variation became a powerful weapon for Beth Harmon in the celebrated The Queen’s Gambit, offering her an effective defence in the most important games.
In a series of works developed over the past two years, Juliusz Kosin transcribes grandmaster chess games into the language of geometric abstraction, transferring the notation of moves in this essentially two-dimensional game onto the surface of the canvas. The movements of the pieces are transformed here into a system of lines, creating complex arrangements that might seem entirely accidental. The ideal of flatness of the painterly medium, postulated in the 1960s by Clement Greenberg, encounters the nature of chess here in a surprising way, resulting in an amalgam of purely aesthetic experience and a fascinating transformation of intellectual contest and the depth of its tradition.
What matters in the artist’s works is therefore not only this collision of languages. By drawing on historical games from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, the paintings tell both the history of chess and the dramatic political history of the past century. This radically abstract game—like many other sporting disciplines—has repeatedly become a reflection of collective aspirations and an arena of nationalist tensions between great powers.
The earliest protagonists of Kosin’s works presented in the exhibition are Akiba Rubinstein—the prototype for the character in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense, a Polish genius of positional play, thanks to which he became one of the leading players of the first two decades of the twentieth century before his career was buried by advancing mental illness—and Marcel Duchamp, who in the 1920s abandoned avant-garde art in favour of developing a chess career, although despite several achievements he never managed to attain major international success. Kosin also pays tribute to Judit Polgár, the first female grandmaster to surpass a 2700 rating of the International Chess Federation, and to Igor Kovalenko, a Ukrainian player who returned to the game after three years spent in the trenches of the war against the Russian invasion.
Kosin deliberately reaches for key moments in chess history. The most famous duel in the history of chess may undoubtedly be considered the clash between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky during the 1972 World Championship match. The contest was watched with tension on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the American’s victory, 12.5–8.5, broke the long-standing dominance of Soviet chess players, becoming a significant moment in Cold War politics. Another radical breakthrough to which the artist refers is Kasparov’s legendary confrontation with the supercomputer Deep Blue, regarded as the moment when human players were dethroned by machines. Kasparov’s defeat initiated a new era in the history of the game: electronic chess engines, refined ever since, systematically refuted numerous openings and introduced new ideas that had previously been marginalised by grandmasters. The fragment of the encounter between Stockfish and AlphaZero captured by Kosin records a chess game at a level far beyond human cognitive capacities. In a certain sense, the moment of the chess world’s capitulation before the dispersed subjectivity of artificial intelligence may be seen as a symptom of global anxiety in the face of what is probably the greatest technological, social, and political transformation of recent centuries.
Michał Zawada
