Jakub Woynarowski Novus Ordo Seclorum / New Order of the Ages

The project “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (“New Order of the Ages” – according to the ancient poet Virgil), realized for nearly a decade by Jakub Woynarowski, represents an interdisciplinary artistic endeavor focused on exploring the connections between the achievements of the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century and phenomena from the realm of ancient art.

The common thread tying together all elements of this fictional yet grounded narrative about art is a conspiracy theory suggesting the existence of a secret, iconoclastic society responsible for artistic, religious, and political revolutions in the history of modern Western culture. This conspiratorial narrative highlights three centers of “mystical” proto-avant-garde. The first is Nuremberg in the 16th century, a Reformation hub where enthusiasts of geometric abstraction, such as Lorenz Stöer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Hans Lencker, created their works. The second is Paris at the end of the 18th century, home to visionary, revolutionary architects like Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu. The third center is Moscow, where constructivists such as Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko operated. The narrative unfolds in a digressive and nonlinear manner, revolving around an ever-expanding investigation map— a multi-faceted compilation of graphics, collages, photomontages, and diagrams. The organizing metaphor of this quasi-scientific visual atlas is a hallucinatory vision of a French garden, serving as a labyrinthine gallery of abstract spatial forms that emerged, despite formal similarities, in distant historical epochs: from Neoplatonic studies of perspective through cosmological models to examples of modernist architecture. Previous iterations of the project have been presented at venues including the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Fondazione Memmo in Rome, MeetFactory in Prague, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and MOCAK in Krakow.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog.

Jakub Woynarowski was born in 1982 in Stalowa Wola. He obtained a master’s degree from the Faculty of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2007 and completed his doctorate in the same field in 2017. He currently leads the Narrative Drawing Studio at his alma mater. An artist, designer, and independent curator, he creates projects at the intersection of theory and visual practice. He is the author of several books, including “Corpus Delicti” (co-authored with Kuba Mikurda) and “Dead Season.” He developed the artistic concept for the Polish Pavilion at the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2014, he received the “Paszport” award from the weekly “Polityka” in the category of visual arts. In collaboration with Aneta Rostkowska, he has organized curatorial projects at venues such as De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, the National Gallery in Prague, and the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne. He has participated in dozens of exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere and Fondazione Memmo in Rome, MeetFactory in Prague, Kunsthalle in Bratislava, CAC in Vilnius, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and MOCAK in Krakow.