Consonni Radziszewski Launches With a Three-City Footprint
If 2025 revealed the structural cracks in the way the traditional art world—and particularly the gallery business—has operated, this year has offered a tantalizing glimpse of myriad possible solutions, from acquisitions to international partnerships and local cooperative infrastructure. Adopting more fluid and flexible structures, dealers and art professionals are rewriting the playbook of a highly competitive, potentially unsustainable system that has risked veering too far from its original purpose: supporting and circulating art across geographies and communities.
Consonni Radziszewski launched with a new space in Milan timed to the city’s art week and the coming Venice Biennale, the result of a merger between Lisbon-based Mandragoa, founded by Matteo Consonni, and Warsaw-based Galeria Dawid Radziszewski. The pairing was a natural outgrowth of a collaboration that began in 2021 with shared art fair booths and joint projects, including the co-representation of Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska. “At first, it was about sharing visibility with different publics, but also sharing ideas: how to install a booth, how to communicate a project. Then it evolved into sharing all costs and all profits. That was the best test to understand that we could really work together,” Consonni tells Observer. “Through these experiences over the years, we realized we could collaborate more, do things together and actually benefit from each other. That gradually led to something that is no longer a collaboration but a full project. Now we are one entity.”
Consonni Radziszewski will maintain spaces in Lisbon and Warsaw while it opens a third gallery in Milan. Housed in a historic early 20th-century Milanese building, the new space reflects both opportunity and necessity. With rising demand for real estate in the city and a new tax regime that facilitates an influx of capital and wealthy international residents, the choice was partly strategic and also aligned with dealers’ shared ambition to establish a stronger foothold in a more central European market. For Consonni, the choice to open in Milan was also personal—a homecoming after 10 years away. “Coming back to Italy now represents the pivot of this whole operation,” he says. “It is the meeting point of mine and Dawid’s vision in a city that has always rewarded those who have an innovative mindset.”
Yet the two dealers could not be more different, which is perhaps why it works. Consonni came up through Goldsmiths, Jan Mot in Brussels and Franco Noero in Turin—he knows the art world, as Radziszewski puts it, “right at its heart.” Radziszewski opened his first gallery in Poznań at 20, from what he calls “the fringes of the global art world.” “It’s interesting,” he says, “that despite these different histories, we have very similar conclusions and identical goals.”
But they have much in common. Operating at the periphery rather than in the main global art hubs, both galleries have grown organically over time, establishing a name recognition and reach that extend well beyond their regional scenes by presenting at international fairs and championing early-career artists who are now participating in biennales and featured in international museums. Both were ambitious and determined. “I don’t want to be labeled as a ‘Central European’ gallery anymore. I want to be a real partner in the international art world,” Radziszewski says. “Milan is a strong destination that can connect these markets, but there is also another reason we opened now: we didn’t want to wait. We want to grow now—to become a mid-sized international gallery, not defined by geography,” Consonni adds.
Both emphasize that this is not a story about the art market consolidating under pressure—their model isn’t a response to crisis but a bid for growth. Asked for a single word to describe what they’re building, Consonni offers three, one per city: “The forwardness of Warsaw, the lifestyle of Lisbon and the elegance of Milan.” Radziszewski, meanwhile, simply says, “Ciao.”
Operating in Portugal, Italy, and Poland will enable the new gallery to connect three distinct but increasingly dynamic markets. Italy has a long-established collecting tradition, while Poland has seen rapid growth, with collectors becoming more active internationally and acquiring higher-value works. “Not many people realize how fast our market is growing,” Radziszewski says. In recent years, most of the gallery’s income has come from Poland, and collectors are no longer buying only at a few thousand euros—purchases in the six-digit range are now common. “There are serious collectors who travel, visit fairs and buy from major galleries internationally. Poland is now the 20th-largest economy in the world. This creates real opportunities.” Polish collectors, who once focused primarily on Polish artists, are also beginning to buy internationally, according to Radziszewski, who sees this as a key factor behind the gallery’s more international repositioning. “We want to be among the first truly international galleries with Polish roots.”
Portugal, meanwhile, has transformed since Mandragoa opened in Lisbon in 2023 from an affordable base into a more globally connected network, driven by both local expansion and an international influx. “When I started in Portugal 10 years ago, it was not because the market was strong but because it was a great base—cheap and unexpected. That created opportunities. Today, the situation has changed,” Consonni explains, noting how two parallel markets have emerged: a locally focused Portuguese collecting base and an increasingly international one driven by an influx of people from abroad. Portuguese galleries have expanded internationally, and foreign galleries have opened in Portugal, putting the country more firmly on the contemporary art map.
Located in a villa tucked behind the entrance of a residential palazzo and invisible from the street, the new two-floor Milanese space has a strong character of its own, creating new possibilities for artists to engage with an environment quite different from either Lisbon or Warsaw.
The immediate plan is to host one exhibition on the ground floor, while using the upper floors as a showroom to offer a snapshot of the diverse range of practices and narratives in their program. But that might change in the near future, as Consonni and Radziszewski resist rigid exhibition structures. The gallery will remain flexible, adapting its rooms to a range of formats as the program evolves and as the artists’ needs shift. “No artist will ever have the same experience in each city—the spaces, architecture and context are completely different,” Consonni points out, explaining how exhibitions will be adapted to the architecture of each space. “If we have a more intimate show with smaller works, Lisbon might be the right place. Larger exhibitions might be better suited to Milan or Warsaw. Each location offers a different atmosphere.”
Beyond that flexibility, the program will be resolutely international. “We both bring international programs, and by merging, they become even more international. We don’t need to think in terms of being local anymore,” Radziszewski says, adding that even with a presence in three specific contexts, the gallery is connecting three points on a European map rather than representing local scenes. “This is about removing that sense of folklore attached to non-central locations. Nobody asks a New York gallery to justify its ‘local’ identity. We want the same freedom,” Consonni echoes.
The Milan space opened late last month with a solo show by South African artist Buhlebezwe Siwani, one of the fastest-rising artists in the Mandragoa program, who has received significant international institutional attention in recent years and will have work in the 2026 Venice Biennale. “Being in Milan—just a few hours from Venice—allows us to amplify that moment and present the results of her research developed over the years,” Consonni says.
Concurrently, the Warsaw space will host a joint exhibition featuring Annette Barcelo and Jason Dodge, presented in partnership with Galleria Franco Noero as part of the Constellations invitational program. And in Lisbon, a solo exhibition by Tomasz Kowalski will open on May 27, coinciding with ARCO Lisboa.
The now-expanded gallery will continue bringing work to major international fairs—together, as before, but now under a single name—starting with their participation in the Established section of miart, followed by the Galleries section of Art Basel in June. Subsequent exhibitions will foreground this commitment to building an international and intergenerational dialogue, contextualizing and expanding the framing for artists across both programs, as seen in an upcoming show pairing Transavanguardia artist Enzo Cucchi with rising Polish artist Alexandra Waliszewska. “This reflects our approach: bringing together a major, internationally recognized artist with another who engages a broader, more cross-disciplinary audience,” Consonni concludes. “It also creates a dialogue between Italy and Poland, where we each come from.”
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