Collections
Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
The National Forum of Music in Wrocław from 19 February to 31 July 2019.
Curators: Joanna Egit-Pużyńska, Anna Podsiadły, Henryk Gac
Building a collection of art is a process that, like art itself, is subject to constant transformation and periodic verification. The pride of many cultural institutions in Poland – museums, art centres, foundations – is the legacy of many generations of artists, successively collected for its sharing, popularisation and promotion. Fragments of individual collections, put together in different configurations, in different spaces and locations, allow a new look at the collection as an open system and dialogue of artefacts with what is up-to-date, current and at the top.
The exhibition prepared by the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, based on the collections of both institutions, presents works by outstanding, canonical artists and significant artists of the young and middle generation, active within various tendencies and artistic trends. The show is a representative collection of Polish art of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of our century.
From among many thousands of works, the curators selected nearly sixty exhibits, including full sculptures, spatial objects and installations, a video from the Orońsko collection and large-format oil and tempera paintings from the Zachęta collection.
The presentation is built, among others, of abstract and conceptual art, as well as works representing figurative, postmodern and expressive tendencies inspired by pop-art, which is a reaction to the new reality and the economic and cultural situation in our country after 1989. Some of them derive from their authors’ interest in the current phenomena of contemporary culture, while others are isolated from prevailing fashions or trends.
On the exhibition are presented two of Paweł Kowalewski’s pieces: “September 17th. Juliusz Słowacki, Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Władysław Jagiełło, Józef Piłsudski” from 1988 and “Fear and Impotence are Attacking a Man” from 1987.