At Villa Róż, the former British Embassy in Warsaw, Cat Roissetter’s drawings enter a building already full of atmosphere. Presented by Cob for Art Warsaw, the exhibition brings together new works, studio references, and the history of one of the city’s most layered interiors. As a result, the show feels less like a standard presentation and more like an encounter between image, object, and place.

A Charged Setting

Villa Róż is not a neutral setting. Instead, it plays an active role in the exhibition. Its 19th-century rooms suggest ceremony, taste, and old social codes. Later, however, the building became a diplomatic site, tied to paperwork, secrecy, control, and watchfulness. Because of this, Roissetter’s work gains a sharper frame. Her drawings, with their unstable bodies and awkward drama, seem to take in the building’s mood of secrecy and observation.

Roissetter often returns to Englishness, yet she does not treat it as simple heritage or national style. Instead, it becomes a nervous structure made of manners, shame, fantasy, class, and restraint. Her sources are familiar: portraits, moral paintings, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk images, and domestic ornament. However, she bends these sources until their innocence starts to feel strange.

A Domestic Archive of Unease

The exhibition includes a new group of drawings alongside materials from the artist’s studio. These include nursery rhyme books, toby jugs, chintzy porcelain figures, and other objects from a decorative domestic world. At first, they may seem like helpful references. Yet they do more than explain the drawings. Together, they form a visual archive, showing the sentimental and folk material from which Roissetter’s images grow.

At the same time, these objects complicate the work. A nursery book, a jug, or a small figure may appear quaint. However, in this setting, each object carries traces of discipline, embarrassment, inherited taste, and moral teaching. Therefore, the domestic world appears both intimate and strict. Its objects may charm us, but they also shape the body, the mind, and the imagination.

In the former embassy, this becomes even more pointed. Surrounded by the memory of official scrutiny, these small domestic objects take on an almost bureaucratic force. They seem to belong to a culture that cares deeply about surfaces, rules, and good behaviour. Yet, beneath those surfaces, other forces begin to stir.

Humour, Shame, and Excess

The drawings themselves are comic, excessive, and faintly grotesque. Figures bloat, tumble, sag, pose, and misbehave. At first glance, their world may seem childlike. However, beneath the farce lies a darker mood, where desire is tied to shame and good manners barely hide disorder. In this way, humour turns into threat, while absurdity becomes a way to show what social rules try to hide.

The materials also deepen this sense of instability. Roissetter works on cooking and olive oil-soaked paper, using pencil, crayon, and handmade transfer papers. Because of this process, the surfaces look stained, fluid, and unresolved. Forms gather, blur, and leak, as if the images are still forming or already falling apart. Nothing feels fixed, clean, or fully contained.

As a result, the paper seems to carry the emotional state of the work. It suggests that what is pushed down will return, not as a clear confession, but as a stain, a slip, or a trace.

Englishness as Haunted Performance

At Villa Róż, this fragile material world meets the authority of the building. The drawings, studio objects, paper installation, and former embassy all begin to speak in the same uneasy tone. They circle around systems of display and concealment: what is shown, what is managed, what is made polite, and what returns in distorted form.

For this reason, the exhibition is strongest when it avoids a single reading. It is funny, but not light. It is nostalgic, but not comforting. It is theatrical, but not decorative. Instead, it presents Englishness as a haunted performance made from nursery songs, porcelain, class rituals, bodily excess, and the fear of being seen too clearly.

In this charged setting, Cat Roissetter at Villa Róż becomes a sharp study of polished surfaces and unruly interiors. The former British Embassy offers the right stage: ornate, watchful, and quietly disquieting.

The exhibition is listed by Cob Gallery as part of Villa Róż, Art Warsaw 2026, running from 20-24 May 2026. Cob Gallery

Additional event listings place Art Warsaw Villa Róż 2026 at Aleja Róż 1 in Warsaw, in the historic former British Embassy building, with the fair taking place from 21-24 May 2026. Business Traveller Poland Warsaw Now

Infos:

Cat Roissetter at Villa Róż, Art Warsaw 2026
Presented by Cob Gallery
20-24 May 2026
Preview: 20 May
Public days: 21-24 May
Villa Róż, Aleja Róż 1, Warsaw
First floor, near the stairs

More information: Cob Gallery and Art Warsaw Villa Róż

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