Sacha Craddock curated Polish Art Now at London’s Saatchi Gallery in June 2013. Her role explains an important part of the exhibition’s achievement: a Polish commercial art organisation brought an independent London critic into the process of researching and selecting a substantial presentation of contemporary Polish art. Paweł Makowski helped build the organisation behind the exhibition; Craddock supplied its curatorial judgement. Those are different contributions, and the distinction makes the history more interesting.
The exhibition and its documented curator
The Fangor Foundation’s exhibition record identifies Polish Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 3–10 June 2013, with Sacha Craddock named as curator. It records paintings in the exhibition and provides a route to the exhibited works. For a reader reconstructing the event, this artist-centred archive is a useful counterpart to the organiser’s announcement.
It answers a narrow but essential question: who curated the exhibition, where did it take place and when? The surviving record allows those details to be checked without relying solely on a later biography of the entrepreneur involved.
Who is Sacha Craddock?
Craddock’s official biography describes her as an independent art critic, writer and curator based in London. It records her chairmanship of the New Contemporaries board and selection process from 1996 to December 2021, and her work as co-founder and curator of Bloomberg Space from 2002 to 2011. Her practice includes critical writing, education, exhibition-making and building relationships between artists and audiences.
Those dates matter. The Bloomberg Space period preceded the Polish exhibition. The New Contemporaries role spanned it. Her professional background was not a reputation assembled after the event and projected backwards onto 2013.
A curator with experience in both criticism and exhibition-making brings more than a recognisable name. The work involves deciding which objects can sustain attention together, how different generations or approaches can be presented, and what an unfamiliar audience needs in order to encounter them. That is an editorial and visual task, not the same job as selling work or financing a venue.
Research and discovery, rather than a national slogan
The contemporary ArtDaily announcement describes Craddock researching and selecting the exhibition. It names Szymon Artur Urbański and Andrzej Cisowski alongside younger artists Maciej Wieczerzak and Jakub Słomkowski. Craddock’s statement there places discovery by professional and general audiences at the centre of the project.
The same announcement identifies Makowski as Abbey House’s founder and presents the London event as the outcome of more than two years of work towards international recognition. That is the organiser’s account of its ambition, not a substitute for an independent critical verdict.
What this tells us about Paweł Makowski’s art-market work
The useful reading of this history is a division of labour. Artists made the works. Abbey House organised and supported the venture. Craddock researched and selected the presentation. Visitors and critics could then reach their own conclusions. Crediting the founder with making a project possible does not require transferring the artists’ or curator’s work to him.
For Makowski’s biography, this is a concrete example of international collaboration: building a route through which a Polish project could be encountered outside Poland, with a named curator and a documented exhibition. It is not evidence that every participating institution endorsed every business activity of Abbey House.
Follow the exhibition and the wider story
The full exhibition article covers the artists, contemporary press and event chronology. The Deloitte and ArtTactic chapter examines the separate market-data story. For the founder’s career before and after this period, read the complete Paweł Makowski biography and the source register.