Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

artist: Marek Sobczyk
cooperation on the part of Zachęta: Hanna Wróblewska, Julia Leopold
exhibition project: Małgorzata Sadowska Anonimowi Architekci

The first presentation of Marek Sobczyk’s “museum” in quotation marks took place in Zachęta’s Mały Salon in February 2006. This was a time when the landscape after the “cold war of art with society” (to quote Zbigniew Libera) was beginning slowly to be formed anew. New institutions were emerging. Not just those that were intended to have an influence on the art market, but also those stimulated by official cultural politics.

The "Museum in quotation marks is […] an individual response to the phenomenon of the gathering of collections, of the creating of new places of acquisitions, of museums, of the employing of curators, of the manipulating of the machinery of the market with the aim of crating collections, and also with the field of the presenting of collections, of the publishing of papers”, Marek Sobczyk wrote in 2006 in the folder accompanying the exhibition. The artist (being both the curator and the director of this institution) took in quotation marks such artists as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Stanisław Dróżdż, James Joyce, Roman Opałka and Kazimir Malevich. With the help of art, Sobczyk submitted both the style and the first and surnames of artists to analysis, as it were creating his own works in their name. Entering into an artistic dialogue with art and cultural history, he became at the same time a critic and theorist of art.

Over the last 10 years, it seems that reality has caught up with Sobczyk’s vision. New museums and art spaces have been created, new collections, both private and public, have emerged, and new commercial galleries now serve new collectors, a new market and a new canon. But Marek Sobczyk’s “museum” in quotation marks is still at work, undergoing successive unveilings. One artist – “making” the works of other artists, taking in “quotation marks” their works. One curator, one director and vice-director, one technical assistant – all one and the same person – the artist writes today. At the exhibition in Zachęta, he investigates amongst others critical art (Kowalski, Kozyra and Żmijewski), and the work of Uklański, but also that of Polke, Richter and Duchamp. By taking these (and other) names in quotation marks, the public receives not only their art, but also an image of it, through the analysis of artistic styles by Marek Sobczyk. In this edition, the “museum” in quotation marks will also feature installations, sculptures and objects as developed by Sobczyk to accompany paintings by Marek Sobczyk – one of the most interesting contemporary painters with an unwavering place in the canon of Polish art.