Newsweek remarks upon the emergence of East European galleries at big art fairs and traces the rise of the role of the private sector in the arts in Eastern Europe:

It’s no accident that the rise corresponds to an increase in private backing. In cities like Warsaw, Sarajevo, and Sofia, Bulgaria, younger artists—tired of the lack of support from cash-strapped ministries and museums—are curating and promoting their own shows and hosting exhibitions in everything from small studios to abandoned nuclear bunkers. “Across the region there is not a lot of governmental support for contemporary art,” says Jonas Zakaitis of Vilnius, Lithuania’s Tulips & Roses Gallery. “So the art scene is driven by personal initiatives, or by some crazy guy who has an idea.”

Meanwhile, commercial galleries are increasingly present not only at art fairs like Basel and London’s Frieze, but also in cities throughout Western Europe. The gallery Plan B in Cluj, Romania, has an outpost in Berlin, as does Ljubljana’s Galerija Gregor Podnar. Warsaw’s Lokal_30 opened a gallery in London’s East End last autumn, and Tulips & Roses is relocating to Brussels in September. Galleries from Eastern Europe are also working together to create projects like Villa Reykjavik—organized by Warsaw’s Raster Gallery—where 14 Western and Eastern European galleries have set up an international art district in Iceland’s capital for the month of July. “It is very important to develop a regional exchange of ideas,” says Lukasz Gorczyca, the cofounder of Raster Gallery. “We understand each other well because of the black hole of communism that we all went through.”

Eastern Promises (Newsweek)