Izabella Gustowska. A Dining Table Becomes a Screen

Images drift across the top of an oval, dark-veneered table: glazing bars, branches, a face, layered archive footage in sepia, projected from above onto the wood. The video runs 24½ minutes, according to the list of works, and it is the installation that gives Izabella Gustowska's exhibition at KVOST, the Kunstverein Ost, its title: "Home’s Shadows". The place where a family gathers becomes the screen for pictures from its own archive. The show is built around that single idea, and wherever it sticks to it, it is very good.

The rooms are painted in colour, grey-green at the front and anthracite round the corner. KVOST is a ground-floor shop unit with a tall window onto the street, cars parked outside, and the colour pushes the street away. On the grey-green wall hang three slender, upright ovals, pointed at both ends like surfboards, with black-and-white photographs stretched over curved canvas. They show children at the seaside, like pictures from a family album. One has two girls in shallow water, the smaller one in a sailor's cap. Another shows two children in trunks at the water's edge, their heads lost in the dark, notched top of the frame, and one a girl on her own, hands on hips. According to the list of works, these are three pieces titled "Homes shadows" (2026), each named for the people pictured: "(Leokadia and Izabella)", "(Leokadia and Wojciech)" and "(Izabella)". The middle oval, with the two children, is "(Leokadia and Wojciech)", 240 × 80cm, and the other two measure 239 × 66cm. A pale water line runs across the wall through all three, so the separate snapshots share one horizon and add up to a single beach.

Round the corner it goes dark. The table stands here, antique, on two pedestals with curved legs and brass caps, its top split down the middle, and under the projector the grain of the wood shows through the images. Beside it, a horizontal oval box glows cold blue from within: six children in a row, arms resting in front of them as if at a table, but where the table top should be there is a dark, rippling surface like water. It is the only light box on the list of works, and the floor plan puts it in the same room as the table: "Dinner Party" (2026, 88 × 226cm). Dinner table and sea lie in a single surface here, and that is how the beach wall at the front locks into the room with the dining table at the back.

So the oval comes back three times, in the table top and the light box as well as in the supports for the photographs. The projection onto the table does the most. A dining table is where a family sits face to face every day. Nobody lays this one, and the shadows of the title lie literally on the wood, branches cast as if through a window. The cables are not hidden. They run down the corner into a wall socket, with trunking along the skirting. In the half-dark that breaks the spell a little, because the table looks as if it had been carried out of someone's home and the cable reminds you a projector is running.

The show is curated by Monika Branicka and has been running since 10 September. The gallery handout and the website list it in the Featured Section of Berlin Art Week and link it to the KVOST fellowship and the Claus Michaletz Prize 2026, awarded by the Secco Pontanova Stiftung to artists from Eastern Europe. Gustowska was born in Poznań in 1948 and still works there. She was at the São Paulo Biennial in 1983 and 1987, and in Venice in 1988. For the new work, according to the Kunstverein, she went back to the house in Poznań where her family has lived since 1938.

The handout lists 13 works spanning 46 years, the earliest from 1980, the latest from 2026. The earlier ones include "Beyond Myself" (1985 to 1987) and "Relative Similarities" (1980). The two roughly hewn wooden posts with mounted partial forms, on the wall beside the shop window, are the wood boards of "Beyond Myself Ia (Selfportrait – Hands)", 202 × 56cm, and "Beyond Myself Ia (Selfportrait – Head)", 213 × 54cm, both 1985, according to the list of works and the floor plan. Beside the ovals and the table they stay in the background, and the tone is set by the work of 2026.

As an installation of new work, "Home’s Shadows" is tightly made, with wall colour, light and the recurring oval leading from the bright beach wall to the dark room with the table, from summer into the house. The earlier work the handout lists stays in the shadow of the new, and little of the 46 years comes across in the rooms. You can live with that, because the strongest statement in the show needs no look back: an old table where the shadows of a house lie instead of plates.

Izabella Gustowska, "Home’s Shadows", is at KVOST, Leipziger Straße 47, Berlin, Wednesday to Saturday 2 to 6pm, until 28 November.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.