Nicolas Grospierre renders sunlight visible in Heliograms
Polish-French artist Nicolas Grospierre presents Heliograms, a photography-adjacent series currently on show in the Salle de Salomon at the Royal Łazienki Palace in Warsaw, on view until December 31, 2026. The project centers on a singular technique: images formed not by camera, lens, or chemical development, but through the direct, months-long exposure of velvet to sunlight. Created both in the countryside of northern Poland and, for this exhibition, directly on site at the historic palace, the works reveal how the sun itself becomes a recording instrument.
Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
solar light shapes velvet into delicate images
At the core of the process is a deliberately minimal setup. Sheets of velvet are masked with constructed forms or architectural silhouettes and then placed outdoors for four to five months. Over time, ultraviolet radiation gradually bleaches the textile, allowing an image to emerge through slow chromatic change. While the Polish-French artist determines the orientation, mask, and duration of exposure, the outcome remains partly unpredictable. Light intensity, shifting weather, and micro-variations in the environment contribute to a result that is guided yet never fully controlled.
This interplay between precision and contingency gives Nicolas Grospierre’s Heliograms their ambiguous aesthetic, poised between photography and painting. They follow a photographic logic (images produced by exposure) yet sidestep its familiar apparatus. Instead of capturing a moment, each work grows into the fabric, its contours shaped by atmospheric conditions. The resulting forms often appear like soft halos, spectral silhouettes, or faint architectures, suggesting presence through absence.
Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
A slow dialogue between light and fabric at Royal Łazienki Palace
Conceptually, the series foregrounds a direct material encounter with the sun, a force vast, distant, and immeasurable at the human scale. The works do not portray this star but index its physical contact, marking the passage of time and the exposure of a vulnerable surface to an overwhelming energy. The gesture becomes both scientific and poetic: an attempt to register something that far exceeds human control.
For the Royal Łazienki Palace, originally the Enlightenment-era summer residence of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, Grospierre created two new site-specific Heliograms, aligning the process with an architectural context historically shaped by ideas of light as clarity, order, and knowledge. Installed in the Salle de Salomon, the works enter into conversation with a space designed around the interplay of structure, landscape, and illumination.
Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
Nicolas Grospierre and Heliograms in the Salle de Salomon, Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw, 2025 (exhibition view)
Nicolas Grospierre, Heliogram (Cerulean Clouded Moon), 2025, Velvet, oak frame, 90 x 100 x 7 cm
Nicolas Grospierre, Heliogram (Red Planet), 2025, Velvet, oak frame, 90 x 100 x 7 cm
project info:
name: Heliograms
artist: Nicolas Grospierre | @ngrospierre
location: Royal Łazienki Palace, Warsaw
photography (439)
Nov 27, 2025
Nov 14, 2025
Oct 18, 2025
Sep 24, 2025