Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków MOCAK

ul. Lipowa 4
30-702 Kraków

phone 12 263 40 00
page museum

How to get there :

on foot

by car

Public Transport

Opening hours

Monday

closed

Tuesday — Sunday

11.00 — 19.00

Ticket Prices

normal 14 PLN discount 7 PLN family ticket for groups of up to 5 ( including children under 6) 30 PLN normal group 10 PLN reduced group 5 PLN Tuesdays — admission free

Zofia Kulik, “All the Missiles Are One Missile”

Photomontage using combination print. The composition is made through repeated imprinting of one or more negatives on an appropriately masked paper. Zofia Kulik’s collages are complex visual texts. Each carries a message that has been carefully devised and executed.

Pola Dwurnik, “Mercy!”

Twenty four colour self-portraits stand out from the crowd sketched in the background; each face plays out the spectacle of a different personality.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “HONOURABLE / disloyal”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact. The choice of words has been thought of carefully. They are all related to current ideological and patriotic discussions. Gender play is an additional device to manipulate meanings. The same adjective has different connotations depending on whether it is feminine or masculine.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “MADE IN POLAND / foreign”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact. The choice of words has been thought of carefully. They are all related to current ideological and patriotic discussions.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “NATIONAL / exclusive”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “Ojczysty / Macierzysta”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “ETHNICALLY PURE / national”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact. The choice of words has been thought of carefully. They are all related to current ideological and patriotic discussions.

Jadwiga Sawicka, “IMPIOUS / infamous”

From the mass of thickly laid off paint, there emerge words taken out of context and deliberately crooked. The clash between the background and the semantic content enhances the impact.

Katarzyna Górna, “Fuck me, Fuck you, Peace”

A photographic triptych, showing women in different stages of their lives – from youth, through maturity to old age. The adopted poses as well as the compositions with a static, “altar-like“ quality point to the inspiration by Christian iconography, recurrent in the artist’s work. The work deals with the relationship between age and the attitude to life. A young woman wants to be loved, a mature woman is fed up with everything and the old woman craves peace.

Tomasz Bajer, “Minimalism of Guantanamo”

The work is an accurate replica of Yasser Talal al Zahrani’s prison cell at the American detention camp for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Saudi prisoner died in 2006. The official cause of death was given as suicide. However, an examination by an independent pathologist showed traces of repeated beating, which could be indicative of torture. The work can be interpreted as a commentary on the abuse of human rights by imperialist powers, and the individual’s helplessness in the face of such behavior.

Ogawa Shinji, “View of Delft (“Behind You” series)”

Ogawa using the classic medium reproduces the work of the Dutch master Jan Vermeer's View of Delft. Realistic, 17th-century image shows a fragment of the city along the waterfront of the river Schie.

Krištof Kintera, “All My Bad Thoughts”

Visualization of the Spiritual State. It is difficult to convey depression because of the lack of words, and the available expressions are banal to the point of ennui. A painting turns out to be a more capacious and sensitive medium than words or poetry. The “black secretion of the soul” is poured over a reclining figure.

Mirosław Bałka, “7+1”

The sculpture 7+1 consists of salt cylinders sitting in concrete containers. The last of those turns independently. The cylinders were made of salt from the Kłodawa salt mine, noted for its brownish impurities, which give each cylinder its individual appearance.

Dan Perjovschi, “MOCAK Kraków Notebook”

Minimalism of style and verbal content, linked by an ingenious concept. The drawings allude to social, economic and artistic issues. The stance is critical: witty but also marked by bitterness.

Teresa Murak, “Third Crop”

The work visualises the process of growth, maturing and decay. Simultaneously, it carries a natural association with the traditional Polish Easter custom of growing from seed water cress, which thus becomes a symbol of new life. The work is also permeated with the longing to be at one with nature, also present in the artist’s other works.

Sarah Lucas, “Sucky Thing 2011”

The work is one of a series of sculptures made from tights filled with down. The material used and the soft shapes achieved connote the female. Simultaneously, however the biological shape placed on a lavatory, reminiscent of faeces, triggers revulsion.

Ai Weiwei, “Oil spills”

This is a ceramic work – a technique that is inseparable from Chinese culture. The porcelain objects were fired in Jingdezhen, a city famous for its ceramics. The six elements in the MOCAK Collection, which simulate crude oil stains, are part of a 25-part installation. The work is a commentary on contemporary economic conditioning. Oil – a resource that impacts on international politics – symbolically “stains“ the world.

Tomasz Ciecierski, “Painter’s Palette”

A witty and ironic treatment of the colour-cum-symbol means available to painting. The artist plays with the shapes of splashes of colour, approaching colour in a free-flowing style. Sometimes, such splashes mean no more than the colour itself; at other times, they stand for an art trend or an object. Through such a ”naive” colour game, one discovers the rich and diverse idiom of painting.

Bartek Materka, untitled [“Skeletons”]

Reconstruction of an open grave. By the manner of painting, the artist has emphasised the emotive quality of the represention of a post mortem.

Edward Dwurnik, “Hunting a Dangerous Villain”

The painting was a response to Martial Law in Poland. It shows an imaginary city, which – as is the case with the majority of Dwurnik’s paintings – we view from above. At first glance, everything seems tranquil, stable and safe. Only a searching examination reveals the drama of a city taken over by the army.

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