Fabulous Łódź – with its history, still to be clearly felt in the urban tissue, its social issues, a continuing modernization and commercialisation of public space, the unique Muzeum Sztuki and the avant-garde tradition, a history of famous projects organised by artists for artists, the world-renowned Łódź Film School (PWSFTViT), the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) educating visual artists and fashion designers, or fi nally a vibrant music scene – was what I wanted to present at Kordegarda Project.

This exhibition of the work of Rajmund Ziemski is of a retrospective nature. Its title is Landscape 1953–2005. For over 50 years the artist gave his paintings the title Landscape, embellished usually just with a number and the year. The exhibition recalls the whole of the artist’s oeuvre, showing the many changes in his work, striving always for the best expression of his emotions and fears in the language of painting which he used with a great sense of mastery and freedom. Thus, on show will be paintings from the 50s up until 2005, both the earlier works to whose exquisite effects of colour and texture he owed his popularity, and later works that are much less well-known.

The exhibition is aimed at children spending the holidays in the city. We present works from the Zachęta collection: paintings, sculptures, and videos related to the themes of the city and holidays. The exhibition rooms will transform into something of an “educational playground” in which games will be inspired by the works of the artists on view there, and the exhibition space will merge with a workshop space.

The Summer of Youth, or in Polish Letni nieletni, is an exhibition about young people. About this particular time in a person's life, when the personality is undergoing an intensive process of formation, when feelings and passions are being awoken; when the reality which surrounds us stops being simple, and begins to glisten with a multiplicity of colours, phenomena and thoughts... Youth is a time of strong conflicts, when the need for freedom is just as strong as the need for support, and when from great adventures it is just a small step to big problems. Avoiding simplistic labels and dividing lines, the exhibition The Summer of Youth presents a diverse picture of young people in contemporary Polish art.

For the current exhibition Eva Weinmayr, born in Augsburg and living in London, shows three videos investigating the mysterious vanishing of the English artist collective Art in Ruins. Formed by Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, Art in Ruins came to international prominence in the 1980’s and 1990’s, provocatively addressing capitalism, discrimination and the art world. After a distinct political phase of activity, Art in Ruins became quiet, a state that they describe as being ‘in limbo’. Weinmayr fills this silence by speculating on the reasons for the withdrawal.

The exhibition presents a key period in the work of Jan Lebenstein: that of the whole decade of the 60s, with special attention to the first “three Parisian winters”: 1959/60, 1960/61 and 1961/62. This is when Lebenstein’s private mythology found its characteristic expression. Up until then it had remained “encoded” in axial figures and “decoded,” but not publicly revealed, in intimate mini sketches and gouaches. This duality of the artist’s creativity was shown for the first time.

The exhibition at the Kordegarda Project in Warsaw is another part of the series Briesen, pursued by Krzysztof Zieliński since 1995. ‘Briesen’ is the pre-1945 name of the artist’s home town of Wąbrzeźno. The whole series is a documentation of a personal experience of Berlin, the artist’s new domicile.  

Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe” is the first comprehensive exhibition featuring art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s based on the theme of gender roles. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the curator Bojana Pejić, along with a team of experts from 24 different countries, has put together a selection of over 300 works including paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, posters, films and videos. With over 200 artists, the exhibition paints an exceptionally diverse picture of a chapter in art history that until recently had been largely unknown and that could also act as an important addition to contemporary gender discourse.       

The exhibition concentrates only on the problem of the world of animals, exploring artists' diverse takes on this problem and the range of ways of visualizing it in art. The point of entry for the exhibition is the desire to overcome the dogmatic anthropocentrism that places the human in the centre of the world as a privileged species of the highest ontological status. This viewpoint continues to dominate in contemporary science, and as a consequence we witness the exclusion of other species/phenomena of life on earth from the sphere of scientific knowledge in terms of their subjectivity or rights.          

The exhibition Polonia and Other Fables is the first individual show of Allan Sekula’s work in Poland. It links his oldest with his newest works, but it is not a classic retrospective show. It is constructed around two major themes: social engagement and the search for a zone in which the private and personal are linked with the universal and the commonplace.    

This exhibition in Kordegarda – prepared as part of the cycle, Room with a view devoted to urban themes – is the latest presentation by Paweł Borkowski after a break of several years which he devoted to design work. Paweł Borkowski is to be found in Warsaw from time to time, sometimes he lives here for a while, and thus he has retained a freshness of vision which permanent residents of the capital habitually lose. His eye, not dimmed by habit, registers paradoxical situations. However, we have to do justice to the artist in stating that he is willing to turn his ironic optic also on himself. One of the sources of inspiration for the exhibition is the dyslexia that he really suffers from – motifs of dilapidated neons creating linguistic mistakes are intentionally included in the works shown at the exhibition.

Zachęta National Gallery of Art announces a retrospective exhibition of the work of Zbigniew Libera, combined with the publication of a wide-ranging monograph on the artist in English and Polish. The exhibition will be the first such extensive presentation of the artist’s work in Poland and, following his American show (Ann Arbor, 2006), only the second retrospective worldwide of the oeuvre of the author of such works as Lego. Concentration Camp” or Positives.   

In his most recent project, prepared specially for the Kordegarda as part of the Room with a View series, Maciek Stępiński portrays selected fragments of Warsaw’s urban landscape. Stępiński talks about places close to his heart: tennis clubs, in which he played or competed as a boy. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from a name of real tennis club, evokes the period of late communism, when tennis was an elite sport, a symbol of a better, ‘Western’ lifestyle and Warsaw’s tennis clubs stood out from the dull greyness of almost everything else. Today, these are mostly abandoned or neglected places. The buildings show signs of wear and tear, and vegetation has run wild and taken control of the courts.

This exhibition has been organised within the frame of the 4th edition of the biennial competition Views 2009 — The Deutsche Bank Foundation Award for the most interesting figures on the young Polish art scene. The exhibition is a presentation of the seven artists nominated for the award: artists whose work over the course of the past two years has earned the particular attention of critics and curators.

A monographic exhibition of the work of an artist who made his debut in the 80s as the founder and leader of the legendary Wrocław group Luxus. In addition to documentation of the artist’s early works (principally drawings and comics), we also present paintings from the last fifteen years. Pastiches in a pop art poetics, the use of templates created from press photos, ornaments or plants, references to a wide spectrum of pop culture, the history of art and politics, as well as humorous slogans easy on the ear… these are just a few of the features of this intelligent and provocative art.  

To Pee in a Bun is the fifth presentation of a selection of works from the Zachęta collections. At the exhibition can be seen works either rarely or never before seen. The exhibition’s curator Karol Radziszewski – has made a subjective selection and reinterpretation of works, placing them in new and at times surprising contexts.       

Szymon Kobylarz’s most recent project, created specially for the Kordegarda, is another in a series of the artist’s experiments with gallery space and
artistic genres. Kobylarz likes to tell stories, create parallel realities, lay false trails, set traps for the viewer. The visitors of his exhibitions often feel like moving through a virtual-reality gaming system. The artist has been fascinated
lately by issues from the intersection of science, technology, military science and conspiracy theory.

This time as part of the Room with a View cycle of exhibitions devoted to urban issues we are presenting at the Kordegarda the work of contemporary artists from the Caucasian cities of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Their photographs, fi lms, and objects show the region’s landscape and architecture marked by history and socio-economic changes, and the daily life of its inhabitants.

Invasion of Sound. Music and the Visual Arts proposes a reading of the esthetic relationship between the visual arts and music as relating to culture, rather to cultures. Such an approach can encompass the whole of music and, at the same time, art in its entirety. To be precise, the exhibition pays particular heed to the points of friction between different musical genres, between different esthetic universes, between different cultures. In other words, Invasion of sound. Music and the visual arts aims to reveal how certain musical contexts of particular works disclose a critical distancing with the cultural, social, historic or political norms that the work addresses.

Even though you are at exhibition in a gallery, on this occasion you are allowed to touch everything and play with the installation-toys. This playground is a bit like a laboratory where you can make experiments and see what happens if you act in one way or another.

The exhibition grows out of the need to reconsider Jerzy Grotowski’s work as a phenomenon essential, not only in the perspective of the development of the theatre, but also in the wider context of the cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century to which the visual arts, theatre and literature all testify.

Elements from Grotowski’s work will be shown through the prism of the visual arts: film documentation of rehearsals, performances, actor exercises and interviews with the director will be placed alongside works by artists who are linked to him by a common inspiration or similar approaches to art, the body and spirituality.

The starting point for the project are murals which, associated above all with wall painting, on this occasion are to be a pretext for a variety of different interventions in/on the architectural interior of the Zacheta gallery. In addition to classical painted murals, the exhibition will also witness the realisation of non-murals: that is to say non-painted installations created from big format prints or other unconventional materials, which somehow reproduce or imitate painted effects. 

This exhibition aims to present a comprehensive picture of the artist’s rich and multifaceted oeuvre, which encompasses various disciplines of the visual arts and is situated at the interface of many artistic currents. The exhibition bases on the artist’s rich, unedited yet, archive, as well as museum, gallery, and private collections.

The year 1968 is a time of the culmination of a great number of wildly different political and social tensions. Protests, unrest and demonstrations took place all over the world, from Mexico and the U.S.A., through Germany, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia to as far as Japan (without neglecting Latin America). The exhibition Revolutions 1968 does not present the art of those times. It is rather an attempt to portray this period through art (although not just through art) from different perspectives: historical and documentary, or through interpretations and re-interpretations of social problems and cultural phenomena characteristic of this turbulent time.

Włodzimierz Pawlak (born 1957) – painter, performer, poet, art theoretician, member of Gruppa (one of the most important artistic collectives of the 1980s) – had until now never had either a comprehensive solo exhibition or an exhaustive publication about his work. The Zachęta show will be the first retrospective presentation of the artist’s oeuvre, covering the years 1984-2008.

The exhibition presents a synthetic overview of the work of a well-known Polish woman sculptor, who participated in the crucial actions of Polish art of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition is also an opportunity to confront the sculptural tradition that developed in the studio of Xawery Dunikowski.

Alina Ślesińska is a great absence in the history of Polish contemporary art. She is compared to the other famous Alina, Szapocznikow, for like her she made her debut in the 50s, in the period of socrealism, and like her she was also interested in figurative sculpture inspired by the work of Henry Moore. However, Alina Ślesińska’s work is currently hardly even given a reference in monographs on contemporary sculpture and in dictionaries of art.

At the exhibition in Zachęta will be shown paintings from the last few years, loaned from the artist’s studio and from collections in Poland and abroad.

This year’s exhibition presents a selection of seven creators whose activity has captured our attention, has delighted and intrigued us, making it impossible for us to remain unmoved. A common feature of the majority of the works presented here is a dialogue with culture and a post-critical relation to politics and social mores.

The Bill Viola exhibition in Zachęta is the first individual presentation of the work of this outstanding artist and pioneer in video art who has played a major role in the recognition of video as new form of artistic expression and in the development of this medium.        

The exhibition gathered in a single exhibition space the selected works of over 60 artists of different generations and different backgrounds, bearing testimony to the potential, diversity and changes occurring in the field of this once most valued of arts.

He is renowned chiefly as an illustrator, but since the mid-1990s painting and sculpture have occupied a signifi­cant position in his art. The exhibition aimed at presenting precisely this part of the artist's work.