In 2013, fire consumed art studios in the Warsaw’s Praga district. The scale of destruction was brutal, the element completely obliterating Karol Radziszewski’s studio. In 2017, Czułość gallery in the Old Town in Warsaw caught fire. Flames blazing from the electric installation rose to the ceiling. Covered in soot, Janek Zamoyski’s works had to be evacuated along with the gallery; years later, they found a substitute home: the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok. Another venue fell victim to fire in 2019, Rafał Bujnowski’s studio this time round. The inferno broke out at night, gaining such force over a mere several minutes that it took the fire brigade to put it out. While some works could be salvaged, others were scarred. (Footnote: fire consumed Mirosław Bałka’s studio in 1993 as well.)

Marek Kijewski brutally assailed Mariola Przyjemska’s works in 1991, stabbing them with a kitchen knife. Julita Wójcik’s Rainbow burned a total of seven times under recurrent attacks. In 2012, Włodzimierz Umaniec, also known as Vladimir Umanets, defaced Mark Rothko’s painting in London, signing it with his own name in ink, and adding a radical yellowism manifesto line. Removing it would remain art conservators’ nightmare over the next 20 months. In the year 2000, Daniel Olbrychski acted out in the spotlight of TV cameras at Piotr Uklański’s exhibition The Nazis held at Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery, taking a slash with a sabre preserved from the film set of The Deluge. His victim? The image of Karl Kremer, the character portrayed by the actor in Claude Lelouch’s Les Uns et les Autres (1981). That same year, at the same place, deputy Witold Tomczak destroyed Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture La nona ora, removing a meteorite weighing down the effigy of Pope John Paul II. Four years later, at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok