The Polish contemporary art collection of the National Museum in Wrocław is one of the most interesting and most valuable in Poland. It numbers over 30,000 artefacts spanning such artistic disciplines as painting, print, drawing, sculpture, glass, ceramics and photography, as well as the environment and conceptual works, documentation of happenings and video art.
The presentation of the most interesting exhibits in the Four Domes Pavilion is an attempt to show the diversity and many aspects of Polish contemporary art, and makes it a ‘live’ exhibition, constantly modified and expanded. Its individual sequences illustrate, while respecting the chronology of events, the most vital artistic issues of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The general tone of the collection was given by a few generations of prominent artists, all influenced however by two trends: Expressionism and Surrealism. There are also works of art created by the local community, evocative of such characteristic phenomena as the conceptual and contestation art of the 1980s.