This exhibition organised to mark the centenary of the birth of Henryk Tomaszewski – graphic artist, designer, cartoonist and one of the most important figures of Polish graphic art after the Second World War – will present the unusually expressive, unique style of the artist’s graphic design and its sources.

In My Global Problems, Alicja Łukasiak presents her recent works. The artist spent the last few years travelling – around the Far East mainly, but also throughout rural Poland – and became preoccupied with ecology, reading about climate change and other hazards resulting from the destruction of nature and wasteful exploitation of natural resources.

Alice: Wonderland Across the Road (a twin project to Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski. Alice at Sakson Garden) is presented at the Zachęta’s ground floor. Here the inspiration came from Carroll’s play with scale, perspective and space.

Created at the Polish Pavilion by the Institute of Architecture and Jakub Woynarowski, the exhibition Impossible Objects deals with the relations between modernism and politics in the context of building a modern nation state. The show’s highlight is a natural-scale replica of the canopy over the entrance to the burial crypt of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Polish political and military leader, created in 1937 at the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków according to a design of Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz. Several alternative variations of the canopy presented by the architect illustrate the process of arriving at a modernist form: from historicising loftiness to modern simplification.

The projects presented at the Zachęta and the opposite Saxon Garden public park were inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the famous story of a girl who finds herself in a mysterious world, where she experiences incredible adventures and meets peculiar creatures.  The story’s absurd dream logic has made it one of the most original and inspiring books ever written.

The exhibition Monument. The Architecture of Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, connected with the presentation in the Polish Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, concerns the issue of the mythmaking potential of architecture. Szyszko-Bohusz, a former legionary connected with Józef Piłsudski, as an architect of the regime projected monuments: buildings that were to act as the memorials of the epoch, to express the spirit of the reborn state and to revive its praiseworthy history, but also to give testimony to the good life and progress through the effective realizing of the commissions of the political and financial elites of the day.

With the onset of the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ in the Eastern Bloc countries and the proclamation of a scientific-technological revolution, science and technology became an important weapon in Cold War rivalries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, causing space flight, modern telecommunications and nuclear energy to emerge as the symbols of the following decade. New scientific disciplines, including astronautics and the literal ‘detachment from the earth’ it made possible, as well as the impact of cybernetics (now rehabilitated in the communist bloc) and its related disciplines such as biocybernetics, robotics or artificial intelligence, shaped the collective imagination and provided a strong inspiration for all artistic disciplines, from painting, sculpture and music to design, architecture and urban planning.

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art presents the first individual exhibition in Poland of the work of Victor Man – the Romanian painter, recently named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2014.

Real-Time Controller – exhibition prepared by Marta Węglińska, Maciej Nowacki and Martha Hryniuk – its first show had in the Silverado Gallery at the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts. In Zachęta Project Room curators will show a different version of the project, raising questions about the nature and opportunities to reproduce the principles of the original.