Works by Polish video art pioneer Jolanta Marcolla, and installation artist and performer Robert Kuśmirowski, have enriched the collection of Poland's National Museum in southwestern city of Wrocław - the institution's senior promotion expert Magdalena Skrabek told the Polish Press Agency.
The artworks in question represent the domains of photography and sculpture, and they became a part of Poland's National Museum in Wrocław permanent exhibition - "Collection of Polish Art from the Second Half of the 20th and 21st Centuries".
Jolanta Marcolla is considered among the trailblazers of Polish video art and conceptualism in the 1970s. Her creative interests include photography, film, and video. The Wrocław museum acquired her 1975 work titled "Kiss" which - widely seen as one of the most avant-garde works of Polish video art and conceptualism.
"In a looped image, the artist blows the viewer a kiss. This simple, repetitive gesture became one of the first Polish experiments based upon the idea of a moving image repetition. The work combines direct expression of emotion with reflection on media, foreshadowing visual strategies familiar today from digital culture"
- the Wrocław museum curators described the acquired Marcolla's work.
Robert Kuśmirowski is a performer and creator of installations, objects, drawings and photographs. His work explores issues related to time, memory, and history. The Wrocław museum's collection added to its collection his 2011 installation titled "Variation on the Theme of Roman Opałka's Work".
"The installation consists of a the artist's table workshop, a typewriter, a numerical chronicle with numbers from 1 to 6,000,000, three portraits - the last of which is a posthumous negative - and an oil painting with a record of digits blending into the background"
- the description of Kuśmirowski's work in question reads. As emphasized, the installation is an allegory to the life and work of another Polish artist, Roman Opałka, who wrote sequences of numbers on canvas to represent the passage of time.
The two iconic works by contemporary Polish artists were acquired by the Wrocław museum as part of the project "Expansion of the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Four Domes Pavilion" - and the purchase was co-financed by Poland's Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund.
(mm)
Source: PAP, IAR