Krakow in Art | Art in Krakow

It was in Krakow that the first Academy of Fine Arts was opened. In 1879 the first national museum was founded here and 3 years later the first institute of art history.

Krakow is also the heritage of modernity – the place of birth of the first and second Kraków Groups, which were of key importance to the history of Polish contemporary art and the city in which after the Second World War an attempt was made to materialize the utopian idea of an ideal city (Nowa Huta). 

The building, built specially for the needs of the Krakow BWA branch (currently Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art), had gigantic, as for those times, exhibition space of ca. 1000 m². The designer was Krystyna Tołłoczko-Różyska, while the distinctive facade made of concrete casts of wooden formwork was designed by Stefan Borzęcki and Antoni Hajdecki.

For centuries the cultural legacy as well as the prose of daily life, historic events alongside legends have been an important source of inspiration for artists affiliated with Krakow. Today's art often enters into dispute with tradition and heritage; it wants to be an impulse for a change for the better, to abolish fixed patterns, spark a revolution or alter the way of thinking. Often enough artistic activities have the form of pro-social or pro-ecological projects.

The Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art Collection includes many examples of works whose authors ingeniously draw on the culture-making and symbolic potential of the city they live and work in. Among them are Adam Rzepecki, Cecylia Malik or Małgorzata Markiewicz.

 Graduate of art history at the Jagiellonian Univeristy in Krakow (1979), founder of the avant-garde art group Łódź Kaliska (1979), between the 1978 and 1981 ran Jaszczurowa Galeria Fotografii in Krakow. At that time, like many other artists in the 1970s and 80s. he willingly marked his presence within the work and in this way attempted to analyse the influence of media on the content of the message. The series Self-portraits from Krakow is one of the works that date back to that period. The home city became a background for the dominant figure of man. 

In his series Rzepecki employed a uniform composition. The artist poses with the same facial expression while the wide angle of the lens held straight ahead makes his arms and head appear out of proportion. Rzepecki's activities from the 1970s are pioneering in relation to the modern “era of the selfie”.

Interestingly, in 1978, a year prior to Rzepecki's project, the historic centre of Krakow was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The black and white 1970s photographs are today a testimony to a bygone era showing the city before the tourism boom, where today's crowded sights surprise with their emptiness.

The 6 Rivers photographic series and the film of the same title are documentation of the project carried out on the premises of Krakow from early autumn 2011 to late summer 2012. Cecylia Malik decided to get to know the city in which she has lived since her birth from a new, totally unknown perspective. She set off on a lonely journey down the Krakow's 6 rivers in a handmade boat. 

The cruise from the city's administrative boundaries to the mouths of the rivers in the Vistula river was documented by the cameraman Piotr Pawlus and photographer Potr Dziurdzia. The project's aim was to show the endangered beauty of the rivers, which have lost their utility value for the inhabitants: no longer do they power mills, provide food or water. Those forgotten waterways are often turned into sewers or rubbish dumps.

Her art is permanently characterised by interest in the fate of a contemporary woman in a “male” world, opposition to domination and fixed power relations.

Pretty Lasses is a series of photographs featuring models wearing floral skirts. Their pattern has been based on the shape of the Maltese cross, a motif taken from Caritas – a series of pastel drawings by the Young Poland artist and dramatist Stanisław Wyspiański.

The original form of the monument, rejection of familiar conventions such as realistic portraits cast in bronze and placed on stone pedestals combine with an attempt to create a new language of sculpture in public space.