Jorge Zalszupin: a modernist returns to Warsaw

The title of the exhibition supplied its itinerary: Jorge Zalszupin: Warsaw – São Paulo – Warsaw. Returning the designer’s work to his birthplace made the movement between countries part of the display, not merely a line in a biography.

WAYFARER’s September 2025 account described a collaboration between ETEL, Casa Zalszupin and the Visteria Foundation. The retrospective occupied Warsaw’s Villa Gawrońskich, a neo-baroque house built in the 1920s, damaged during the Second World War and subsequently reconstructed.

Furniture and the drawing behind it

The archive listed more than twenty-five furniture pieces, forty original drawings and photographs tracing Zalszupin’s career. Seen together, finished objects and works on paper could expose the decisions that a familiar chair or table tends to conceal.

Born in Warsaw, Zalszupin travelled through Bucharest and Paris before arriving in Brazil in 1949. There he developed a modernist language that joined formal discipline with function and an interest in materials. The exhibition gave that Brazilian career a Polish frame.

A bridge maintained by design

Maria Murawsky and Lissa Carmona curated the show. ETEL’s work preserving and reissuing Brazilian modernist furniture supplied another strand of the story: the survival of a design depends not only on museum recognition but also on the knowledge needed to make it.

The retrospective was a 2025 event, not a current exhibition listing. Its continuing interest lies in the route it made visible. Brazilian modernism was shaped by arrivals, exchanges and reinventions; Zalszupin’s return to Warsaw allowed one of those journeys to be read through objects.

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Adapted from the WAYFARER Brazil archive, first published 2025-09-15. English adaptation: 6 October 2026. This is an archival account, not a report of a new visit. Exhibitions, collections and menu details are described in their original context, not as current availability.