Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (3(39).2014)

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The Museum

photographic documentation, ephemeral works and artistic self-publications than on painting
and sculpture. Works and documents of artistic activity gathered in this small space may be
arranged in several sets (fig. 12). These include paintings by members of the Warsaw-based
Gruppa and Leon Tarasewicz, stencil images by the Wroclaw-based Luxus and documenta-
tion of exhibitions by the Koło Klipsa from Poznań - the most renowned artists of the wave
of new expression of this decade. Next to them, we can see the iconoclastic realizations by
members of the Chip-In Culture movement, which contested the social, political and artistic
status quo, the most important assemblage publications (Tango, Luxus, Oh, It’s Alright Now),
a selection of video works and animations by Tomasz Sikorski, Robert Brylewski and Marek
Janiak. The sequence of works is opened by a photo-realist painting by Łukasz Korolkiewicz
entitled December iy 1981, Morning, which depicts the moment of announcing martial law on
television by general Wojciech Jaruzelski and the artist looking out of the window of his work-
shop towards the trees and rooftops covered with snow. It concludes with the film From My
Window (1977-99) by Józef Robakowski - a distanced, warm and ironic narrative of a parking
lot in the artist’s housing estate filmed over 22 years, which represents a peculiar story about
three stages of the most recent history of Poland.
The last part of the gallery houses a selection of works created during the Third Polish
Republic (fig. 13). The museum’s collection is not representative for this period; it is only thanks
to the activity of the Gessel Foundation for the National Museum in Warsaw that we were able
to venture an attempt at describing the nature of transformations affecting the language of art
in the last decades. Here, we will find a group of works questioning the credibility of image
or, more broadly speaking, the visual message. They challenge the very status of a work of art,
its reception and the social system of values associated with art. This last part is designed as
a temporary gallery which is going to present new acquisitions to the museum’s collection.
It also serves as a reminder that contemporary and most recent art is also within the scope of
interests of the National Museum in Warsaw. The institution is going to make efforts to obtain
a space that would reflect the significance of 20th- and 2ist-century art and enable a showcase
of its collection of art of the past one hundred years.

Translated by Aleksandra Szkudlapska