Wilhelm Sasnal’s painting depicts, in a one-to-one scale, a 43-cm metal object, which comes from the hull of the continental aircraft which caused the crash of the Air France Concorde in 2000. Presented for the first time at the exhibition, Scene 2000, at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the picture is part of a series of canvases of the artist, connected with the subject of disasters and accidents. A few of them refer directly to the events related to the Concorde: apart from the two paintings belonging to the collection of the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, the canvas is also divided into nine sections presenting the individual stages of the plane’s explosion.

The site-specific installation by Andris Eglītis, who combines oil paintings on canvas and spatial objects, straddles the border of materiality and immateriality, documentation and imagination. The artist analyses the abstract ideas of post-war modernism (utopian design, simplicity of forms, and fascination with technology) and confronts them with the organic substantiality of reality. The structure of the work is on the one hand the historical and social context of the Gallery, its functioning in communist times, as well as the fate of its architecture and collections preceding 1989.