Zacheta National Gallery of Art Warsaw-Moscow, 1900 – 2000
20 November 2004 – 30 January 2005
Zacheta National Gallery of Art
plac Malachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw
tel. (+ 48 22) 827 69 13
Tuesday to Sunday 12 noon – 8 p.m.
www.zacheta.art.pl
rzecznik [at] zacheta.art.pl
From November 20th in Warsaw’s Zacheta Gallery and from March 2005 in the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow will be held the exhibition, “Warsaw-Moscow,1900-2000″. The concept of this exhibition makes reference to the earlier exhibitions: “Paris-Moscow,1900-1930″ from 1979, “Berlin-Moscow, 1900-1950″ from 1995 and its second part “Berlin-Moscow, 1950-2000″, presented in early 2004 in the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin, and then in the State Historical Museum in Moscow.
The exhibition is the first attempt to look at the twentieth century art of the two countries without the encumbrances which marked their mutual relations up until 1989. This is a “bird’s eye view” on the richly multifarious Polish-Russian artistic relations during this tempestuous period, with indications of fields still little known, or sometimes completely unknown (like the reception of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s art in Russia), which in the future are worthy of becoming the subject of specialist research.
The composition of the exhibition, dictated on the one hand by the layout of the rooms at Zacheta and on the other by the character of the objects that were obtained, is focused around particular problems of special significance for the specific historical stages of the last century. The exposition is opened by a room presenting the symbolism that heralded the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, shown in the company of typical “salon” works by great masters. Next there are rooms illustrating step by step successive chronological themes exemplary for the art of the two countries, with a special view to the similarities and differences of approach to particular artistic, stylistic and political
problems. Also to be found here will be examples of work produced by the many Polish artists trained on Russian soil, with special attention being paid to students of the Tsar’s Academy of the Fine Arts in St. Petersberg. (Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Jan Ciaglinski, Konrad Krzyzanowski, Kazimierz Stabrowski, Ludomir Slendzinski and others), and also those who worked for a period in that land, such as Boleslaw Cybis, Zygmunt Waliszewski, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Katarzyna Kobro. The chronological basis of the narration is sometimes interrupted by the construction of the exhibition around specific themes, such as the human form, reactions to World War II or art influenced by the ideas of Kazimir Malevich.
Amongst the objects on exhibition (about 400 in number) are to be found masterpieces from Russian and Polish museums and from private collections. Special attractions will be works by Kazimir Malevich (including Black Square), Wassily Kandinsky, the early Mark Chagall, representatives of Russian constructivism and the entirely unknown work of Russian dissidents from the end of the 50′s to the fall of communism. The exhibition closes with the symbolic collision of works from the beginning and end of modernism: Katarzyna Kozyra’s The Rite of Spring is presented in the context of documentation illustrating the first performance of the ballet to which her video installation refers under the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1913.
Exhibition organizers
Center for International Culture Cooperation Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Zacheta National Gallery of Art
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland
The Ministry of Culture and Mass Media of the Russian Federation
The Tretyakov State Gallery
The State Museum Exhibitions Centre ROSIZO
Exhibition Curator
Anda Rottenberg
Walentin Rodionow
Lidia Jowlewa
Project General Coordinator
Grzegorz Wisniewski
Aleksandr Sysojenko
Exhibition Commissioner
Piotr Nowicki
Coordiantion from Zacheta
Elzbieta Sobiecka
Cooperation from Zacheta
Joanna Sokolowska
Patron of Zacheta Galery BRE Bank
