This cross-sectional exhibition of Polish 20th and 21st century painting includes a wide range of works by outstanding Polish artists of different generations — representatives of the key currents of art history and contemporary artistic trends. The exhibition features, among others, contemporary classics, artists representing conceptual attitudes, educators and experimenters, as well as artistic personalities that are worth reminding to the broader audience, who are now relegated to the sidelines of art history.

Among the many roles played by Maurycy Gomulicki in his work as an artist, the role of a pop culture anthropologist is particularly fruitful. This can be seen in the case of the Tats project, dedicated to the documentation of primitive tattoos worn primarily by people identifying with the so-called git (git-ludzie, slang for ‘good people’) subculture, which was popular among young residents of large housing estates in the 1970s. From 2007 on, Gomulicki wandered through flea markets, parks and other marginalised areas of the city, taking thousands of photographs documenting this disappearing phenomenon and capturing this — often primitive, but honest — ‘iconography’ of the dreams of exotic lands, paradise, pleasure and longing, emerging in the most brutal conditions of imprisonment, military service, labour corps and detention centres.

The Tendency to Collapse exhibition, presented at the Zachęta Project Room, was preceded by the artist’s time in Indonesia, which let her more closely explore local historical, natural and cultural contexts. These inspirations led to the creation of a film, an installation, drawings, batik paintings, sculptures and photographs. They tell stories about the inevitability of the downfall/decline, the variability of the world and life in time, the loss of balance, error/deformation/mismatching of elements, and the unreliability of vision.

 

Tango on 16 square metres explores ways of intensifying space, meandering between past and present, Polish realities and global phenomena. The exhibition investigates precarious urban dwelling conditions and their architectural responses through the lense of Zbigniew Rybczyński’s Academy Award-winning short film Tango from 1980.

How does a building work? What are the first impressions it makes? What do we see in subsequent visits? What is the impact of the building on the employees? And finally, what is it as a declaration of a company? Going beyond the questions asked in the abovementioned study, one may ask about the meaning of the senses, in experiencing, in feeling architecture, and analyse buildings from the perspective of the body.

The project Amplifying Nature is based on the premise that architecture is part of processes occurring on a planetary scale. According to the authors of the exhibition—curator Anna Ptak and architects Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis of the CENTRALA collective—it serves not only to offer protection from nature, but is inherently connected with phenomena such as gravitation, water circulation, or the day-night cycle.