Zachęta National Gallery of Art

artists: [[**]], Wojciech Artyniew, Jan Brykczyński, Robert Ceranowicz, Agata Dębicka, Monika Drożyńska, Jan Dziaczkowski, Sylwester Gałuszka&Mikołaj, Robert Jurkowski, Ivo Helior, Krzysztof Kaczmarek, Ada Karczmarczyk, Dimitri Kielbasiewicz, Malwina Konopacka, Tomasz Kopcewicz, Michalina Kostecka, Kamil Kuskowski, Honorata Martin, Ilona Oszust, Julita Paluszkiewicz, Maciej Pisuk, Tomasz Ratter, Mateusz Sadowski, Maciej Salamon, Aleksandra Ska, Jakub Słomkowski, Anna Imiela Szcześniak, Maciej Szupica, Tomasz Wierzchowski, Piotr Żyliński
curators: Olga Baron, Alexandra Czupalla, Marta Czyż, Małgorzata Garapich, Anna Godlewska, Katarzyna Jajszczok, Natalia Jakóbiec, Paweł Lisowski, Agata Nowosielska, Daria Rzepiela, Wiesława Wideryńska, Julia Wielgus

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. Problems which are frequently the subject of media reports. Violence, aggression, increasing lack of morality on the one hand and the volunteers of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Time Help on the other: is this the way to define and categorise today’s teenagers? Avoiding simplistic labels and dividing lines, the exhibition The Summer of Youth presents a diverse picture of young people in contemporary Polish art. The theme is a difficult one, not just because it is surprisingly unpopular in art, even though it is very common in discussions beyond art, but also because the twelve curators, students on the post-graduate programme of Museum Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University, took up the challenge of exploring it through the work of less obvious artists. The exhibition especially concentrates on that which links contemporary art with youth: its processual character. For both art and youth are a process of development: they can never become set in a finite form.