IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR

Chaos, poverty, mass repatriations, widespread fear of the Red Army, but also back the Germans, rampant banditry, looting, lynching, pogroms - is shocking picture Polish after the war. On the screen is composed breakdown of existing social structures, to destabilize the state, distrust of the new communist government, but also the Cold War propaganda used by the uncertainty of new boundaries.

The exhibition is an attempt to answer the question of how the complexity of public sentiment and political tensions in post-war Poland were reflected in the visual arts, photography, film, and architecture and design. Do crucial for the recent Polish history 1944-1948 period is equally important in the field of art? As in the first years of a new, dynamically changing socio-political reality and atmosphere, on the one hand, the "euphoria reconstruction" and hope, the other - described by Marcin Zaremba "great fear" found their artists? What function was to act as her art? How to negotiate their place and language? In what situation their debut young? Is the war and the year 1945 actually constitute a turning point from which everything started all over again, or whether these revolutionary times become an opportunity for the implementation of previous demands and concepts (workers' settlements or "cheap and beautiful furniture for all")?

The exhibition presents hundreds of objects from various fields of art and an extensive archival material focuses on showing several significant problems. A key issue is the link between art and politics, activities in the field of culture peculiar to this period institutions (reader, the Office of Reconstruction Capital, Aesthetics Production Supervision Bureau) and the role of art in propaganda serving the legitimacy of the new government and new frontiers (eg. Exhibition of the Recovered Territories). Another important topic is the problem of reconstruction from the devastation - almost total destruction of the capital opened up urban planners and architects feasibility often utopian visions. Extremely important and discussed during this period about the Holocaust and its commemoration of ways (including monuments, museums opened in the areas of concentration camps) is presented at the exhibition in the context of post-war anti-Semitism.

Leitmotif of the exhibition is the theme of ruins from conception ruins as architecture, through anthropomorphic vision of the crippled city or ancient ruins, after demanding pragmatic solutions to the problem of the removal of rubbles cities or typical for this period of construction of precast gruzobetonu.

The leading role played by photography - both artistic reportage and documentary - as a medium in which she gave the best of himself to know the specifics of time, but also the most used tool of propaganda. Loading the realm of visual post-war years (through the press or photo albums), an unusual number of images of cruelty and violence, left its mark on the art of that time.

The exhibition presents the work m.in .: Mieczyslaw Berman, John Bogusławski, Marian Bogusz, John Bułhak, Mary Chrząszczowa, Zbigniew Dłubak Xawery Dunikowskiego, Krystyna Gorazdowski, Maria Jarema, Felix Szczesny Kowarski, Tadeusz Kantor, Julia Kotarbinska, Alexander Krzywobłocki, Tadeusz Kulisiewicza, Bronislaw Kupiec, John Kurzątkowskiego, Bohdan Lachert, Alfred Lenica, Bronislaw Linke, Jadwiga Maziarska, Jerzy Nowosielski, Fortunata Obrąpalskiej, Julia Pirotte, Erna Rosenstein, Jerzy Skarzynski, Henry Stażewski Strzemiński, Leon Marek Suzin, Helen and Simon Syrkusów, Feliks Topolski, Henryk Tomaszewski, Tadeusz Trepkowski, Boleslaw Utkina, Stefan Wegner, Mark Wlodarski, Wladyslaw Wołkowski, Andrzej Wroblewski, Wojciech and Stanislaus Zameczników.

curator: Joanna Kordjak, Agnieszka Szewczyk cooperation: Magdalena Komornicka world over. Art in Poland forties and its contexts. A series of lectures and seminars accompanying the exhibition "Immediately after the war".