This is the first such large-scale exhibition presenting the MSN’s collection. ‘Non-Permanent Exhibition. 4 × collection’ will open to the public on Friday 21 February. The works on display are an overview of the Museum’s collection built up over almost two decades. More than 150 works created since the 1950s have been prepared for visitors. The exhibition can be viewed until 5 October, with tickets available in advance. Visits on Friday 21 February will be free of charge.
The collection on display consists of works and documents that bear witness to the changes that have taken place in the visual arts over the past seven decades both in Poland and internationally. The works express the diversity of media and artistic attitudes, and illustrate the dynamics of artists’ participation in social life, the circulation of information and the development of new technologies.
From the very beginning, our collection has been built on lively relationships with contemporary women and men artists, and has also reflected the debates taking place in the art community. The regular building of the collection is made possible by a programme of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, but equally important are the grassroots movements and experimental methods of acquiring works that have significantly influenced the shape of the MSN’s collection. The first group of works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw – shown as part of the Art More Precious Than Gold exhibition in late 2008 and early 2009 – was a gift from artists who supported the idea of creating the Museum, says Joanna Mytkowska, director of the MSN.
The exhibition, created by a curatorial team consisting of: Sebastian Cichocki, Tomasz Fudala, Magda Lipska, Szymon Maliborski, Łukasz Ronduda and Natalia Sielewicz, will be divided into four parts that intertwine and at the same time constitute separate chapters of a single story. Oriented around recognisable terms from art history, such as pop art, social realism or abstraction, they cover the same historical period – from the 1950s to the present. Each of the four sections presents a different approach to the same time in art history. The presentation of multiple perspectives is an open invitation to the public to freely construct their own ways of visiting, to notice nuances and to seek individual ways of exploring works from the Museum’s collection.
The tour path begins with a collection of works related to political engagement and dreams of building a better world through art. The next section includes works resulting from a fascination with popular culture, advertising and design. The next section presents art based on an uncompromising imagination, drawing inspiration from non-modern traditions: folk art, non-professional art, indigenous art and artistic practices that develop outside centres and their rules. The final section of the exhibition highlights the question of the limits of art, its independence from other systems of knowledge and cultural products, especially in the context of the decay and destruction of the world as we know it.
Some of these chapters have a chronological arrangement, others are based on aesthetic or morphological juxtapositions. The axes on which the collection’s exhibition is built are stretched between commitment and autonomy, and between popular art, close to life, and affective art, which creates its own worlds and languages. In this way, it is possible to observe how much the meaning of artworks depends on the context in which they are seen. In this way, the curators of the exhibition want to share the symbolic ‘power of discourse’ with the audience, who, together with the narrative of the collection, are given ‘instructions’ to create meanings together with them – in parallel or independently of the proposed imagery – resulting from the juxtaposition of the individual artworks.
NON-PERMANENT EXHIBITION. 4 × COLLECTION.
In the first part of the exhibition, entitled The Banner. Commitment, Realism and Political Art, there are collected works related to political commitment and the belief in the causal role of art. The works come from different countries, decades and ideological orders. There is a triumph of the human figure, journalistic content and a belief in the universality of the language of art. Part of the story is also about propaganda: art in action, for better or worse linked to current politics. This part of the exhibition opens with Alina Szapocznikow’s 1954 sculpture Friendship, which stood in the lobby of the Palace of Culture and Science for almost half a century. After 1992, it was decided to scrap it – the arms of the figures and the banner they were holding were removed to take the sculpture out of the building. These missing elements have never been found again. Near Szapocznikow’s sculpture ‘flies’ a steel banner by Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan. It was made from fragments of the body of a shot-up car found in the town of Severodonetsk, which was seized by pro-Russian military forces in 2014. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and the earlier annexation of Crimea in 2014), the order in Europe has once again crumbled.
The second part of the exhibition is entitled Plastics: bodies, commodities, fetishes from the Cold War to the present. It features works that express consumerist desires, a fascination with pop culture, advertising and mass media – not only in societies that experienced an economic boom and increased consumerism after the Second World War, but also among the inhabitants of the ‘poor periphery’, including Eastern Europe and the Global South. The main metaphor here is the ‘plastic body’ – the body consuming images from behind the Iron Curtain in a totalitarian regime. Plastic (and paraffin), the acquisitions of post-industrial capitalism, are making waves in the second half of the 20th century in both welfare societies and socialist economies. A work that mines the military-consumerist origins of plastics and the fantasies surrounding them is Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s sculpture made of synthetic resin and fibreglass, a material invented for the army. It depicts slender, crossed female legs in turquoise, which are wrapped in a silver vinyl sheath. In the 1950s, both the post-military trench and fibreglass were popularised by fashion and design. The work’s perverse title – Silver Rain – in English jargon means both sexual intercourse and war attack.
The third chapter of the exhibition is entitled The Transfigured World. Art, spirituality and future coexistence. The works gathered here draw on uncompromising imagination and non-modern traditions: folk art, non-professional art, indigenous art, separate artistic practices. The presented objects and artistic attitudes are united by the endeavour to ‘see through’ the reality found, to reach its depths, bringing out its dark, spiritual and existential potential. The juxtaposition of artists from often very distant geographical and political contexts shows the possibility of a future community. This chapter of the collection’s exhibition was inspired by the work of Roman Stanczak. He belongs to the generation of artists who debuted during the political transformation. Stańczak recreated the tensions of this period – rapid change that, in his opinion, lost what was most essential to art and existence itself: sensitivity to others and the experience of depth, when the production of things and the acquisition of goods grows beyond reflection on the essence of life. The third part of the exhibition also features a spectacular sculptural installation by Cathy Wilkes from 2014. The artist’s recreated scene of ‘domestication’ consists of a multi-piece tableaux of found objects – crockery, table settings and small trinkets – as well as handmade mannequins made from yarn and old fabrics.
The final part of the MSN’s collection exhibition is entitled Real Abstractions. The autonomy of art in the face of the catastrophes of modernity. It revisits the question of the boundaries of art, its independence, its ability to remain autonomous from other systems of knowledge and experience of reality. The works collected in this chapter of the exhibition often use the language of abstraction, one of the basic categories of modern art. We view them this time through the prism of a discussion about the crisis of modernity as a dream of progress and unlimited development. Will modernity manage to confront the catastrophes it has accelerated or even caused itself?
The central place in this part of the exhibition is occupied by Monika Sosnowska’s Façade, a sculpture that refers to modern architecture as an illustration of its decay and catastrophe. The artist bases this work on an almost magical trick, making the metal modernist structure sag and wither like a life form in its terminal stage. Here, the modern form is subject to the processes of decay inherent in nature and biology. Sosnowska perversely evokes the modernist fascination with naturally occurring shapes.
Tickets for the Non-Permanent Exhibition. 4 × Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will be on sale from 14 February. Thanks to the strategic partnership with the Audi brand, admission to the exhibition on Friday 21 February is free. We wrote more about the collaboration between MSN and Audi HERE.
Curatorial team: Sebastian Cichocki, Tomasz Fudala, Magda Lipska, Szymon Maliborski, Łukasz Ronduda and Natalia Sielewicz.
source: press materials, MSN
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