Van Gogh & Vincent

A tenement on Bracka, gutted and refurnished

Bracka 13 sits a short walk off Kraków's Main Square, in the Old Town, and the exhibition that opened there on 15 May 2026 occupies roughly 1,500 square metres of it across several floors. The listing name of the space is Piwnica pod Kominkiem; what has been put inside it is thirty-two rooms furnished as places Vincent van Gogh lived, worked, prayed and was treated in.

The decision that shapes everything else is the refusal of the projection format that has dominated Van Gogh touring shows since the late 2010s. There are no walls of moving Sunflowers here. Instead the organisers sourced period furniture, painting materials, crockery and devotional objects from France, Belgium and the Netherlands — more than five hundred works and objects in total — and assembled them into interiors. None of it belonged to Van Gogh. All of it is of the right places and the right decades, which is a different and more modest claim than most exhibitions trading on his name bother to make.

The scholar who found the hillside

The curator is Dr Wouter van der Veen, and his presence is the reason the project reads as scholarship rather than merchandising. Born in Doorwerth in the Netherlands in 1974, he moved to France at ten, took a doctorate at Utrecht University in 2007 with a thesis on Van Gogh as a man of letters, taught as an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, and founded the publishing house Éditions Arthénon in 2004. He began at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam transcribing the 350 letters Van Gogh wrote in French during his last four years. He was scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh at Auvers-sur-Oise from 2012 to 2022 and is president of the Van Gogh Academy.

In 2020 van der Veen matched a postcard from the turn of the century to the tangle of trunks and roots in Tree Roots, the canvas Van Gogh worked on during his final day, 27 July 1890, and placed it on a hillside on the rue Daubigny in Auvers-sur-Oise. He sent the identification to the Van Gogh Museum's senior researchers Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp, who judged it highly likely to be correct; a photograph from around 1907 supported it in 2021. He wrote up the case in a book on the discovery. For the Kraków exhibition he selected the objects himself and wrote the texts.

The producer, and the replica question

The money and the production model come from Hazis Vardar, a Belgian producer of Albanian descent born in 1968, who co-owns the Paris theatres La Grande Comédie and the Comédie Saint-Martin with his brother Alil and who held Le Palace in Paris between 2006 and 2025. Vardar built the Banksy Museum chain, which began in Paris in 2021 as a temporary show, became permanent, and has since opened in Brussels, Barcelona, Prague, Kraków, Milan, Dubai and New York. Those shows display recreations rather than originals, and intellectual-property lawyers have argued publicly that moving site-specific street work indoors behind a ticket barrier inverts what it was for.

That argument does not transfer cleanly to Bracka 13, because the Kraków show does not pretend to hold paintings. What it does hold are nine Museum Editions produced by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam with Fujifilm, reproductions matched to the originals to the micron in size, colour and brushstroke texture, plus digital reproductions on screens. Van Gogh's letters supply the connective narrative. Anyone arriving expecting a canvas the artist touched will not find one; at the time of the opening, Kraków's Europeum branch held one genuine Van Gogh, on show to the end of the year.

Seven chapters, thirty-two rooms

The route is strictly chronological and divided into seven periods. Rooms one to six cover Zundert from 1853 to 1869: the family parlour, the attic bedroom Vincent shared with his brother Theo, the small church where his father preached. Rooms seven to nine take him from 1869 to 1876 through the Goupil & Cie branches in The Hague, London and Paris, rebuilt as a nineteenth-century dealer's gallery hung with the prints that trained his eye.

Rooms ten to twelve, the Borinage between 1876 and 1880, are the darkest stretch: the Belgian coalfield where he worked as a lay evangelist and came out the other side an artist. Rooms thirteen to sixteen cover the apprenticeship in The Hague and Nuenen, with his home-made perspective frame, a paint-stained work table and The Potato Eaters. Rooms seventeen to twenty-two are Paris, 1886 to 1888, where the palette breaks open — self-portraits, flower pieces, a reconstructed Montmartre studio. Rooms twenty-three to thirty run from Arles to Saint-Rémy, taking in Sunflowers, The Starry Night and the asylum ward.

The last two rooms hold the seventy days at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890 that produced seventy-four paintings, then the death, then Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who kept the work and the letters together and made the posthumous reputation possible. Smaller things carry weight along the way — a paint shop, a prayer room, a miner's lodging, a cradle standing in for the period Vincent spent with Sien and her child. Van der Veen's line at the opening was that every detail matters, and that Van Gogh held art to be everywhere and to be a universal language.

Where it stands in September 2026

Four months after opening, the exhibition is running daily from 11.00 to 19.00 with last entry at 18.00, every day of the year. The official site bills it as the world's only permanent immersive reconstruction of Van Gogh's life; the Kraków cultural listings carry a run to 30 December 2026, which is the standard way a permanent commercial show is registered rather than a closing notice.

Admission is 60 złoty for adults, 45 złoty for students, children aged six to seventeen and over-65s, and 180 złoty for a family of two adults and two or more children. Under-sixes go free but must be with an adult over sixteen. A flexible VIP pass at 210 złoty covers a calendar month with priority entry. Booking is in advance through Eventim, with resale listings also running through Biletyna. The building has stairs and is not wheelchair accessible, which is the single hardest limitation on the site. Photography is allowed without flash or tripod; no food, drink or liquids of any kind are permitted inside.

How it has been received

Polish coverage at the launch settled on the same point the organisers pushed: that the show argues against the cliché of the impulsive, misunderstood genius painting on pure feeling, and presents the pictures as the product of deliberate, worked-out decisions. The supporting numbers are the ones the exhibition puts on its own walls — ten years of work, more than two thousand pieces, 840 letters to Theo, a man who only started painting at twenty-seven after failing as a dealer and as a preacher.

Reported visit times vary more than the marketing does. The official estimate is sixty to ninety minutes; a journalist who walked it at the opening put it nearer two hours, which is closer to what thirty-two rooms of read-as-you-go text actually demands. The recurring note in visitor comment is that this is a life told through rooms, not an art show, and that the distinction is worth knowing before buying a ticket.