Did you know that the painting Battle of Grunwald was part of the Zachęta’s collection? Built by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts before WWII, the collection was moved to the National Museum in Warsaw after 1945. It’s where we can see the famous painting by Jan Matejko. But at the Zachęta, the Matejko Hall still remains – it is the largest exhibition space at the gallery, where the painting used to be originally displayed.

Although the Zachęta is a gallery of temporary exhibitions and it does not have a permanent exposition, it has and keeps expanding its collection of contemporary art. You can read how it was created in an interview with Barbara Dąbrowska and Maria Krawczyk (nee Domurat), conducted for an exhibition of works from the Zachęta collection held at the Raczyńskis House (TRUTH BEAUTY GOODNESS. 2015). Thanks to Zofia Dubowska’s questions you will learn why the collection was not supposed to exist and what happened that it nevertheless does.

Regular exhibitions of works from our collection enable us not only to show new items, but also present their diversity. In 2009, in preparation of the exhibition To Pee in a Bun, the Zachęta’s warehouse was combed through by Karol Radziszewski in his capacity as both a curator and an artist. We revisit it by means of a film produced by pleple.tv, revealing what happens to the Zachęta’s collection when nobody is watching. But we also recall the year 2016 and the exhibition Collections. This show crowned the crowdfunding campaign that thanks to social support helped us finalize the acquisitions planned for that year. Apart from new and old works from the Zachęta’s collection, the exhibition also presented one of the most interesting regional collections in Poland – Galeria Arsenał in Białystok.

We step back in time to the year 1966 and the exhibition Contemporary Trends. Paintings from the Collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. ‘A year ago, I visited Poland. […] I saw many studios and I found out how sincerely they cared about the Netherlands. I thought to myself then that it would be worth organising an exhibition that would certainly meet their interests. Nonetheless, as it is difficult to understand the development of Dutch art without educating oneself on its connections to foreign art, I proposed an international exhibition project, presenting modern trends in international art.’ – reminisced Edy de Wilde, director of the Netherlands museum, in the exhibition catalogue. Karolina Zychowicz writes about the works on display at the show and their reception by the Polish audience.

From our film collection, we invite you to watch the documentation of the Ochota version of Krzysztof Żwirblis’s project Social Museum (2012). The artist activates local communities, encouraging residents to tell their own stories and show their private, sometimes completely non-artistic collections. Anyway, we are all collectors.