Introduction
“The Open Collection” is not only the presentation of the recent acquisitions of the Museum of Contemporary Art – Branch of the National Museum in Wrocław, but also an invitation to reflect on the process of creating a public art collection. We reveal the stages of the process of which the museum visitor is usually unaware: from acquiring an artwork to its entering in the museum’s accessions book and ancillary systems of evidence to conservation and display.
Over the recent decade, the collection has grown by close to two thousand works. The exhibition showcases over one hundred carefully selected pieces that in our opinion best illustrate its principal areas and directions:
- new developments, new perspectives,
- Wrocław art scene,
- documenting art history.
The purchases of artworks for the collection are funded from two sources:
- the funds of the National Museum in Wrocław,
- grants of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
Another source of new acquisitions are gifts presented by individuals and institutions.
Please feel invited to look at our collection from a different perspective: as a work-in-progress in constant flux, continuously expanded and transformed, in the end to become our common and shared cultural heritage.
New developments, new perspectives
Works redefining the limits and boundaries of art and proposing new perspectives may appear at any time. Thus, an important aspect of the museum’s acquisitions policy is to follow and immediately react to current developments – as they happen.
In the recent decade, works have been acquired by the artists proposing new approaches to the relationship between the past and present. Nicolas Grospierre photographs architecture in a way that challenges how we view the second half of the twentieth century as the era of modernity. Magdalena Hueckel uses self-portrait to transform personal experience into universal reflection. Tymek Borowski fuses history of art with popular culture and Andrzej Wasilewski harnesses AI to warn about threatening aspects of modern technology. Izabela Chamczyk’s expressive performative painting tests the boundaries of the medium.
Showcasing the diversity of the artists’ approaches, the collection presents a fragment of a broader panorama of contemporary art. Building the collection involves its curators trying to keep pace with artists.
History of the collection
Our collection of contemporary art numbers over twenty thousand artworks and comprises all principal art disciplines and media: from painting, graphic arts, and drawing to sculpture, glass, and ceramics to photography and video. In the first two decades of today’s National Museum in Wrocław, all new acquisitions were being assigned to particular departments based on the discipline/medium, irrespective of the date of their making. Curators of individual departments, like Keeper of Painting Dr Bożena Steinborn, oversaw acquisitions of both historic and contemporary pieces.
The year 1968 brought the turning point in the development of the contemporary art collection: the dedicated Department of Contemporary Art was established in the then Silesian Museum as part of Director Maria Starzewska’s effort to raise the institution’s status to that of national museum. Competition from other cultural institutions in the city was another factor spurring its growth.
The collection’s first curator Paweł Banaś and his successor Mariusz Hermansdorfer, who took over in 1972, exerted the formative influence upon its direction. In 1983, Hermansdorfer was appointed Director of the National Museum in Wrocław but retained his curatorship of contemporary art. He retired from both positions in 2013. During this period, a number of works by modern masters were acquired: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Tadeusz Kantor, Władysław Hasior, Alina Szapocznikow, Jan Lebenstein. Thanks to Hermansdorfer’s strategic approach, our collection of works by Magdalena Abakanowicz is the world’s largest. In 2011, Hermansdorfer arranged the permanent gallery of contemporary art in the adapted attic floor of the Main Building. Five years later, the exhibition’s new expanded edition (twice as big!) opened in the newly-restored Four Dome Pavilion. The building, designed by Hans Poelzig for the Centennial Exhibition in 1913, has become the seat of the new branch of the National Museum in Wrocław – the Museum of Contemporary Art. From 2018, it has been headed by Irena Bigos.
Thanks to the knowledge, dedication, intuition, and personal contacts of the curators who have contributed to its growth over the decades, some specializing in modern art and others responsible for specific disciplines, the National Museum in Wrocław has an exquisite collection of contemporary art, the fruit of collective labour, representative of major developments in the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Department of Photography and Intermedia
Started in the 1960s by Henryk Derczyński, the collection has grown into one of the largest in Central Europe. Its gems include priceless early daguerreotypes that have survived the war. The first contemporary photographs were acquired in 1963 from photographers active in Wrocław (or their families): Wadim Jurkiewicz, Witold Romer, and Stefan Arczyński. In the 1970, Adam Sobota took over, starting the period of the collection’s intense growth.
Adam Sobota talks about the Department of Photography
Department of Ceramics and Glass
The first pieces were purchased in 1952 from salons of PP DESA (state-owned antiques and art dealer): works by Bolesław Książek were bought in Warsaw and Stanisław Jagmin’s Art Nouveau figurine in Poznań. The first glass objects were acquired for the collection following the 2nd National Ceramics and Glass Exhibition in 1960: they were the designs by the alumni of the then State College of Fine Arts (today the Academy of Art and Design) in Wrocław: Zbigniew Horbowy, Jerzy Słuczan-Olkusz, and Henry Witkowski.
Dr Maria Starzewska introduced the practice of acquiring select works from the exhibitions she curated. Her successor at the Department of Applied and Decorative Arts was Anna Chrzanowska. In 1967, the collection became part of the Department of Contemporary Art. Its successive curators were Paweł Banaś, Maria Jeżewska, Bogdan Górecki, Current curator is Barbara Banaś.
Barbara Banaś talks about the Department of Ceramics and Glass
Department of Painting
Initially, the collection of contemporary painting grew thanks to works transferred by institutions, like the Voivodeship Museum Council, Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions, and Ministry of Culture and Art. The first acquisitions, purchased directly from the artist or the artist’s family and financed from the Museum’s then very limited funds date to 1958. One of them was Fruits and Dolls by distinguished Formist Jan Piotr Hrynkowski.
Today, it is one of the most interesting collections of this kind in Poland, owing its original profile, representative of the most interesting developments in Polish modern art, and dynamic development first of all to Mariusz Hermansdorfer, and also to Marian Wójciack, Paweł Banaś, Piotr Łukaszewicz, and Barbara Ilkosz.
Anna Chmielarz talks about the Department of Painting
Department of Sculpture
The first artworks in the collection were pieces transferred by the Voivodeship National Council, the local organ of state administration in Wrocław. First acquisitions from the artists date to 1960, among them was Anka’s Head by the distinguished Wrocław sculptor Jerzy Boroń.
The development of the collection of sculpture was closely linked to the collection of painting, as they were curated by the same person: Marian Hermansdorfer and then Maria Jeżewska and Barbara Ilkosz.
Małgorzata Micuła talks about the Department of Sculpture
Department of Graphic Arts
The collection started with fragments of the topical collections of the city’s former German museums that had survived the ravages of war. It has been systematically expanded by acquiring works directly from artists and collectors and also thanks to generous gifts by artists. Early acquisitions in the 1950s included works by Stanisław Bogdan Wojewódzki and Konrad Srzednicki. The acquisitions policy has been to acquire works representative of emerging and current trends presented at national and international exhibitions. The collection’s successive curators were Barbara Baworowska, Krystyna Bartnik, and Magdalena Szafkowska.
Magdalena Szafkowska talks about the Department of Graphic Arts
Main Registrar Department
The Main Registrar Department works behind the scene but is essential to the functioning of the museum. Its responsibilities include implementing all required legal and formal procedures regarding new acquisitions, entering the items in the museum’s system of evidence and accession book, documenting, and digitalization. It also oversees the marking and storing of artworks as well as the movement of items inside the museum and loans of artworks to external institutions. On the reverse side, it also oversees the procedure of de-accession when an artwork gets stolen or damaged beyond repair.
The job requires extensive knowledge, patience, and precision. Sometimes also inventiveness and ability to think outside of the box in order to define, name, list, count, and organize items that by the very nature of modern art often escape obvious categorization. The department’s wide range of diverse tasks requires multifarious skills: bookkeeping, monitoring storage conditions, researching the collection’s history and provenance of potential new acquisitions, taking care of legal matters and logistics, arranging transports and insurance, etc. The department’s staff has immense knowledge of the collection as a whole and also of individual items. After several years of working in the Main Registrar Department, any member of its staff has seen every artwork in the museum’s collections at least once.
Conservation
Conservation of works of contemporary art has its special challenges as they are often made of mixed and/or delicate materials: it requires extensive knowledge, imagination, and individual approach. Some materials – like metal, silk, flax, clay, oil paint, wood – can interact with one another with dire consequences for the work’s structural integrity. Metals often present a threat as corrosion may damage other components, like textiles.
So, some contemporary works are particularly fragile and prone to decompose and thus displaying and storing them may require special care and innovative methods of display, for example in oxygen-free atmosphere or strictly controlled exchange of air.
Works from our collection travel often, loaned to other museums in Poland and abroad. Conservators accompany artworks on their journeys, overseeing their transport, unpacking and installing at a new venue.
Often, the conservator’s job requires balancing the artwork’s technical and preservation needs with the artist’s intention regarding its presentation. This is the only way to preserve cultural heritage for posterity.
Accessibility
The Museum of Contemporary Art is determined to enable persons with special needs, who often experience exclusion, to have full contact with and experience of modern culture and art, irrespective of their particular physical, sensory or social limitations. This approach opens the museum to diverse new perspectives.
Physical accessibility has been ensured by installing the YourWay and Navilens systems. Individual visitors may use a free audio guide to the permanent exhibition, as well as a large print and Braille guidebooks. The Contemporary Art Museum also has an offer for persons with impaired sensory processing, for example in the spectre of autism or with hearing impairment. It also organizes inclusive workshops where everybody can express themselves.
In 2022 and 2024, the Museum of Contemporary Art was recognized as the “Institution Accessible to the Visually Impaired”. During lectures and workshops inspired by works from the collection, we use sensory tools. Let’s explore art with all senses. Who knows, how this approach will inspire us?
Wrocław
Krzysztof Skarbek’s colourful, crazy, surrealist My Wrocław opens the Wrocław section. As it has often taken a path different from trends dominant at the time, the local art scene is key to building the collection’s identity.
In recent years, a number of important pieces from the 1980s and 1990s have been acquired. Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka’s colourful, energetic portraits of the fellow members of the Luxus Group (including the artist’s self-portrait) are characteristically inspired by the Pop-Art aesthetic. Jan Jaromir Aleksiun’s original style draws from both high and popular culture, and also from non-European art.
The recordings of Ewa Zarzycka’s performances show yet another, more ephemeral side of Wrocław art. Steering towards the art of text, they are based on stories underlain with subtle humour and a measure of self-irony. The works by Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, who regards himself as an reincarnation of the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer, are filled with spirituality and reflection on transiency.
Gifts
The process of procuring new acquisitions often starts with the curators meeting the artists or benefactors. Gifts presented by artists, their families and inheritors, and foundations, are a very special aspect of expanding the collection. Gifts presented over the last decade include, inter alia, works by Ewa Kuryluk, Natalia LL, Marek Oberländer, Zbigniew Makowski, Kōji Kamoji, Zbigniew Paluszak, Lech Twardowski, Jolanta Nitka-Nikt, Tadeusz Boruta, Aldona Mickiewicz, Eberhard Franke, Łukasz Huculak, and Waldemar Grażewicz. The exhibition features fragments of the gift presented by the late Natalia LL: her early Conceptual photographic works along the later intermedia projects.
The artists’ gifts benefit not only the museum: it is a two-way avenue, strengthening their ties with the institution and promoting their work.
Documenting art history
Mariusz Hermansdorfer emphasized the importance of keeping track of new developments as well registering changes of perspective on historic phenomena. Based on this premise, he has built a collection encompassing Realism and Abstraction alongside Conceptualism, Neo-Avant-Garde, and Socially Engaged Art. Thus, the collection is representative of the oeuvres of the greatest modern Polish artists and developments on postwar art.
We have continued to acquire works by modern masters and this direction has been an important part of our development strategy. Recent acquisitions include minimalist works of Alfons Mazurkiewicz, a leading figure on the Wrocław art scene, contemplative pieces by Kōji Kamoji and Günther Ucker, Krzysztof Wodiczka’s installations underlain by the artist’s socially engaged criticism, Łukasz Korolkiewicz’s Hyperrealist painting, and also poetic pieces by pioneering glass artist Małgorzata Dajewska.
Immersion Room
For many a contemporary artist, film is a medium of choice for realizing innovative projects. The Immersion Room has been set up to present video recordings, intermedia installations, and art films in interactive and dynamic ways. Modern technology and advanced projectors make it possible to achieve quality comparable to a movie theatre. The Department of Photography and Intermedia has in its collection films by Katarzyna Kozyra and Joanna Rojkowska and the recent acquisitions include poetic pieces by Robert Sochacki, Alicja Karska, and Aleksandra Went.