Poland’s richest woman, Grazyna Kulczyk, is planning to build a museum in Warsaw to house her art collection. The entrepreneur told the Polish edition of Forbes magazine that her planned Museum of Contemporary Art and Performance will have 6,000 sq. m of exhibition space and will be located near the city’s Copernicus Science Centre on the banks of the Vistula river. She plans to open the museum on 11 November 2018 to mark the country’s national day of independence. Although the building will be fully financed by Kulczyk, she hopes the city will cover some of the running costs. The city is yet to make a decision on the project.
The Polish capital “needs a Modern art museum on an international level”, Kulczyk told The Art Newspaper in June. “I’m ready to take that project on.” She is currently building a museum near St Moritz in Switzerland. Despite her latest plans for Warsaw, she says the Swiss museum is scheduled to open sometime between 2016 and 2017.
Kulczyk—who was married to the late billionaire industrialist Jan Kulczyk—is the founder of Stary Browar in Poznan, a former brewery that she turned into Poland’s largest cultural institution. It was announced today (25 November) that Stary Browar, which also houses shops and restaurants, was sold to a German investment company for €290m. “It wasn’t an easy decision to sell Stary Browar,” Kulczyk said in a statement. “But for me it’s time for the next step. For many years I have dreamed about building a world-class museum of contemporary art, and I want to dedicate myself to this goal in the coming years.”
