We invite our Partners to visit us for an Erasmus mobility connected to our new exhibition!

Art Assignments
Collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
28 Jan – 17 Sep 2022
Exhibition scenario: Jolanta Gola i Agnieszka Szewczyk
Preparation of the exhibition: the team of the Museum of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw:
Jacqueline Horodyńska, Katarzyna Jankowska-Cieślik, Joanna Kania
Consultation: Maryla Sitkowska
Translations: Piotr Szymor
Conservation care: Dorota Dzik-Kruszelnicka, Zofia Koss, Anna Kowalik,
Anna Szlasa-Byczek, Anna Sembiring
Exhibition design: Maciej Stefański
Visual identity: Fontarte / Magdalena Frankowska i Artur Frankowski

The first exhibition of the Museum’s collection in the new exhibition space begins a new stage
in the history of our Museum. Founded in 1985, it occupied two rooms overlooking Traugutta Street
and organized temporary exhibitions showing fragments of its collections since the beginning
of its activity. But never as a permanent collection. Being part of the Academy affects the nature
of the collections focused on the works of the artists-teachers, students, and the essence
of the educational process.
An academic assignment has become the key to the current presentation. Selected works have been
gathered around the basic themes and issues of art, important in particular for its academic and
educational practice, such as: nude, landscape, still life, portrait, material, geometry, space, design,
process. All the proposed categories have been approached in a broad perspective. On the one hand,
they show the durability of classic subjects, disciplines and media, and on the other, they make
it possible to recognize their vitality: continuous deconstruction, transformation, testing, which
is the essence of academic art. Such a key allows us to present the nature of our collections, their most
important departments, and to emphasize the equivalence of areas once referred to as “pure” and
functional, which has been characteristic of the Warsaw school since its inception.
Selected objects emphasize the permeability of categories, creative dialogue and tension between
them. For abstraction remains in dialogue with geometry and matter painting. The painting formula
based on avant-garde and Colourism permits redefining the approach to the fabric. The Active
Negative assignment, in a spirit of architecture, serves teaching sculptors about space, etc.
This largely ahistorical exhibition allows the collection to be presented as a resource whose potential
can be conducive to constructing alternative narratives about Polish post-war art. In addition
to the works of artists permanently inscribed in the post-war history of Polish art, we also wish
to show those which that history has overlooked, as well as student works.
The ASP Museum collection was created by incorporating two academic collections in 1985
– of the ASP Gallery and the Main Library, donations and loans of works by artists associated with our
Academy, and a few early museum purchases. Basic descriptions of works are accompanied
by information about their origin, recalling the history of building up the collection of the Museum
of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Czapski Palace,
Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 5