Still Life with Euro-Pallet – Bartosz Kokosiński

2025
plywood, glass mirrors

This composition is built from a pallet — a plywood variation on the standard Euro-pallet — accompanied by loosely arranged mirrors.
I came across the pallet discarded in a construction waste container in Warsaw’s Praga-Północ district, while out walking with artist Wojciech Gilewicz. Though it was a rather bulky and heavy object for a stroll, we managed to carry it back to my studio in Saska Kępa. When I was later invited to exhibit as part of Artwalk, it struck me as the perfect opportunity to create a new piece around this found object.
European Square, the location of the gallery, is a highly symbolic site — a space where Warsaw’s transformation into a city of the “American dream” is particularly visible. It’s a place of glass towers and sleek office facades, the physical markers of an ongoing capitalist metamorphosis. This contrast is especially clear just beyond the Artwalk structure, where the reflective surfaces of new high-rise buildings meet the time-worn brickwork of an old tenement house.
The Euro-pallet — a symbol of global circulation of goods, capital, and people — resonates strongly with this context. Found as waste, brought into the studio, and now placed within a contemporary art setting, it has been completed by unsteady, mirrored reflections. Together, these elements form a still life composed of fragments from the construction sites that underpin Warsaw’s high-tech sheen.
As with all still lifes, this work tells a visual story of ongoing transformation – both of this particular urban space and of our collective global journey in search of new social and interspecies ways of living.