Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

artists: Roman Artymowski, Walerian Borowczyk, Tytus Dzieduszycki, Oskar Hansen, Maria Jarema, Jerzy Malina, Ewa Kantor, Tadeusz Kantor, Aleksander Kobzdej, Jerzy Kujawski, Tadeusz Kulisiewicz, Lech Kunka, Jan Lenica, Mieczysław Porębski, Jerzy Sołtan, Ryszard Stanisławski, Andrzej Strumiłło, Bogusław Szwacz, Andrzej Wróblewski and Anna Molska, Janek Simon
curator: Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska
artistic collaboration: Janek Simon
consultation: Józef Chrobak, Piotr Majewski
collaboration: Katarzyna Kołodziej
exhibition design: Paulina Tyro-Niezgoda
research: Ewa Kędziora, Ula Komorek

The exhibition presents a dynamic map of the post-WWII art world in the context of Polish artists’ and art critics’ travels to Europe and beyond. Marked on the map have been the points and vectors of those travels but also how – despite the Iron Curtain and the policies of mutual isolation – knowledge and inspirations were exchanged. The titular ‘migrations’ pertain not only to the artists themselves and their official and semi-official foreign trips but also to the phenomenon of travelling works and wandering ideas. The time frame – arbitrarily adopted — begins in 1947 (the moment of intense cultural exchange, primarily with France, under an official scholarship programme) and ends in 1959 (the height of the ‘expansion’ of Thaw-era Polish modernism in the West).

The context for the stories narrated by the show is provided by a changing political map of the world, freshly emerged from the disaster of World War II, faced by a nuclear crisis, standing between one war and the risk of another. The dynamics of those changes are driven by East-West rivalry over influence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. On the one hand, the colonial system is collapsing while, on the other, the Soviet Union strengthens its international position and pursues a policy of colonization in both its own republics and in the satellite countries that have found themselves in the Soviet sphere of influence as a result of the war.