Small pharma

Exhibition design 2023 | Permanent exhibition in the storefront of the Antonina Leśniewska Museum of Pharmacy, a subsidiary of the Museum of Warsaw | Team: lead designer Jan Strumiłło, assistant designer Marta Szczepańska, assistant graphic designer Helena Wierzbowska | The exhibition is open daily on 31/33, Piwna street | Photos courtesy of Museum of Warsaw | Photography by Tomek Kaczor

Our favourite compact (but potent) museum commissioned a flexible scenography for their double storefront on the Old Town’s busy Piwna street. We proposed a set of boxes with coloured sides, arrangeable into playful compositions. Transparent matt varnish reveals rich full-body hues of their particleboard material. Adding and mixing colourful ingredients in varied proportions seemed like a good metaphor for pharmacy in general. The object tags, printed on orange paper and fastened to wooden bases with green rubberbands mimick vintage prescription drug packaging. We are particularly proud of the enamelled shutter-mounted information panels. we designed to look like pre-war shop-signs – a lost element of the Old Town urban landscape. The beautiful labels of pharmaceutical containers in the Museum’s collection inspired our graphic concept and typefaces used for the panels.