hello@matyldakrzykowski.com
+41 79 890 70 95

 

 

Matylda Krzykowski directs, designs, hosts, writes, and talks about the choreography between people, objects, spaces and ideas. Her transdisciplinary and geographically mobile practice resonates worldwide through exhibitions, installations, talks, texts, exhibits, performances, and workshops.

In 2007, during her studies at the Maastricht Institute of Arts, Krzykowski founded the independent blog Matandme.com, where she portrayed the work and life of contemporary practitioners. From 2011 to 2018, she was the co-founder and artistic director of Depot Basel, a place for contemporary design that became a critical platform for discourse and collaboration. Since 2021, she has served as Artistic Lead of CIVIC, a newly established educational and experimental environment at the Basel Academy of Art & Design.

Krzykowski develops experimental formats that challenge conventional ways of presenting and engaging with ideas. Her work explores how context, medium, and audience shape discourse in culture. Among these initiatives are Desktop Exhibition, rethinking the desktop as an exhibition space; Design Date, a blind date matchmaking event that sparks new collaborations; CIVIC Billboard, a public platform that brings critical messages into urban space; and Airtime – What is wanted?, an exhibition in the form of a television show that questions the desires and demands driving contemporary artists and designers.

In 2018, Krzykowski co-founded Foreign Legion, a globally active curatorial and spatial practice dedicated to systemic change. From 2020 to 2021, she wrote Things Might, a column on the designed environment for Arts of the Working Class Magazine. Between 2017 and 2025, she taught the annual course Show Your Work in the MA Design, Research and Entrepreneurship program at the University of the Arts Bern (CH). In summer 2025 she run a two week workshop around performance and scenography at Summer Academy Salzburg for Fine Arts.

Her recent exhibitions and curatorial projects include Institution Building (CIVA Brussels, 2021), Total Space (Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2020), You Don’t Want Space, You Want to Fill It (Marsèll Paradise Milan, 2022), The Energy Show (Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, 2022), The Final (Group) Show (Dropcity Milan, 2023), and Eleonore Peduzzi Riva (Kunstraum Riehen, 2024). In 2025, she acted as External Curator of the first Conceptual Biennale in Berlin.

In 2014–2015, Krzykowski was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academy , where she conducted research on formats of display. In 2018–2019, she was Visiting Professor in the Industrial and Interface Design Department at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, teaching seminars such as Methods & Formats, Multiversum, and Parallax. In the same period, she joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the Mitchell Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, contributing with her project-based seminar Objects and Spaces for Angels and Machines to an interdisciplinary community of artists and designers.

Since 2019, she has been a tutor at the Critical Inquiry Lab at Design Academy Eindhoven with her training Choreography May Refer to the Design Itself, and since 2024, she has taught in the MA Industrial Design program at ZHdK Zürich, where she develops the annual Work in Progress Show.

Her guiding principle, Strategic Improvisation, dances between precision and play — a liquid framework that slips between art, design, architecture, discourse, and society, treating them as instruments in constant tune and tension. It thrives on flux, invites risk, and turns experimentation into a method for meaning.

 

 

Matylda Krzykowski works with space: objects within space and ideas outside of space. Her work has pulled peripheral threads into the centre, and has cast new light on ideas at the centre of the discourses she nourishes. Although these discourses cannot be reduced to conventional spheres of operation, they could broadly be identified as curation, design, architecture, art and performance. Krzykowski seeks to instigate conversations, works to maintain their energy, and thereby affects results. These results are almost always entirely born from intense and generous collaboration. Her work has resonated globally. Krzykowski is organically interdisciplinary. (It’s a way of doing, rather than a way of thinking.)

The tools she deploys include, but are not limited to: speech, instant messaging, archiving [see: Online Depot], art direction, theatre and performance [see: Design Date], scenography and choreography [see: Total Space], reportage [see: Things Might] and digital space treated as physical space [see: Desktop Exhibition]. The communication vehicles she employs include the exhibition, the intervention, the editorial, the public talk, and Instagram, to name a few. Krzykowski travels widely to develop formats, participate in juries, to give lectures, develop exhibitions, and to conceive and deliver workshops in the cultural field. Wherever she may be, she sees the visible and reformats the unseen.

Written by James Tyler Foster, 2020

 

 

 

‘It’s almost impossible to capture the essence of Matylda Krzykowski in just a few phrases, or even a complete description of her job title for that matter.’
Source: Interview for Elle Decor by Bianca Felicori

 

‘Berlin-based impresario Matylda Krzykowski is reinventing the very foundations of design and architecture and its curation. Her transdisciplinary, geographically mobile practice includes installations, choreography, TV game shows, theater and many other experimental formats, always undertaken with an eye towards progressive principles.’
Source: Design in Dialogue by Glenn Adamson

 

‘We’re joined by this belief that design shapes the way we live, that it’s the reason we walk through doors and corridors with purpose.’
Source: Interview for Interview Magazine by Grace Banks

 

‘Who do you look up to?’ – ‘Mary Poppins. She appears when she is needed; she surprises and moves on once she’s done.’
Source: Interview for We are the Future by Ashley Hefnawy

 

‘If you would found an organisation dealing with design today what would you do differently? – I would propose a union of disciplines, herald the end of ‘design’, stress the importance of the irrational and call for an approach and attitude, which would synthesise topics like ‘home, family, money, health, work, youth etc.’.
Source: Interview No Space Is A Good Place by Nadine Botha

 

 ‘Many of the most influential design curators are female: notably Paola Antonelli at the Museum of Modern Art and Beatrice Galillee at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,  Zoë Ryan of the Art institute in Chicago; Catherine Ince at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; Matylda Krzykowski in Berlin; and Cecilia León de la Barra in Mexico City.’
Source: Book Design as an Attitude by Alice Rawsthorn 

 

Institutional
Archiv der Avantgarden, Design Museum London, Jan Van Eyck Academy, Holon Design Museum, Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, London Design Festival, Civa Brussels, Marres Maastricht, Vitra Design Museum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Makk Cologne, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Victoria & Albert Museum, Z33 Hasselt

Educational
AA Architectural Association, Arizona State University, Bezalel Academy of Art & Design Jersusalem, Brno Design Biennale, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Design Academy Eindhoven, Die Angewandte Wien, Domus Academy Milan, FHNW Basel, Graphic Design Arnhem, HKB Bern, Institut Kunst Basel, Kingston University London, Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts & Design, Muthesius University Kiel, School of Visual Arts New York, Parallel School Lausanne, Pratt Institute, The School of Art Institute Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, The University of New South Wales Faculty of Art and Design Sydney, Virginia Commonwealth University

Others
Adidas, Apartamento Magazine, Base Milano, Bonjour Baby, Chamber Gallery, C-Mine Designcentrum, Current Obsession, Design Indaba, Design Platform Limburg, Diez Office, Fashionclash, Female Design Council, Frame Magazine, Futu Magazine, Gallery Bolte Lang, Gothe Institut Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Jerusalem Design Week, Kompetenzzentrum der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft des Bundes, Lodz Design Festival, Migros Engagement, Muto Heimatgastronomie, Pecha Kucha, PIN-UP, Stimulieringsfonds, Salone del Mobile, Soho House Berlin, Soho House Istanbul, Sozial Muscle Club Basel, TL Magazine, UBS Art Forum, Uncube, Vienna Design Week, Vitra, Wagner Living

Jurys  & Nominations
Dutch Design Award (2011 – 2016), Interieur Awards / Kortrijk Biennale (2014), Outstanding Artist Award (2016),  Limburg Design Icons (2016), Beazley Designs of the Year (Since 2018), Villa Noailles Design Competition (2018), Frame Awards (2019), Design Prize Milan (2019), Jan Van Eyck Academy Selection Committee (2022), Danish Design Award (2024), “Die Besten” Hochparterre (2024), Rimowa Designpreis (2026)

Awards
Nomination ‘Animator’ Designalive Awards (2012), Cultural Advancement Award Stadt Basel / Depot Basel (2013), Nomination Core 77 Food Award / Sagel & Krzykowski (2013), Wallpaper Magazine Award – Best Finished Object (2013), Swiss Federal Design Award for ‘Design Mediation’ / Depot Basel (2013), Alexander Clavel Kulturpreis / Depot Basel (2015), Swiss Federal Design Award for ‘Design Mediation’ / Online Depot (2017)