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 Painting “The Sermon of St. John the Baptist” by Pieter Brueghel the Younger Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638) is known mainly as a copyist of his father's paintings, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525/30-1569), who was one of the greatest Dutch painters of the 2nd half of the 16th century. In his works, he created a coherent picture of nature and the world of people. The Kraków painting, the Preaching of Saint John the Baptist, was painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, based on his father's original from 1566, which is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. |
 Csaba Nemes, “Far from the Sea” Józsefváros, the Budapest district no. 8 still carries the marks of having been bombed during World War II and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The buildings which are no longer there are conspicuous for their absence. For Nemes, these void spaces are more authentic than the buildings which are there, because their appearance has not changed in half a century. The levitating residents are a metaphor for all his compatriots – distrustful, introverted, alienated. |
 Paweł Susid, untitled [“Ladies and you girls, in bathroom and the lavatory you touch places that are dear to us”] Template texts contrast with simple, geometric forms. Apparently banal statements, with ironically erotic undertones, are an invitation to attempt their in-depth analysis so as to expose the social and cultural contexts. |
 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. |
 Painting “Fencing” by Leon Chwistek Along with Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Zbigniew Pronaszko, Leon Chwistek is the main theoretician of the group of Formists who comprehensively analysed the theoretical fundamentals of art and tried to implement the theories he elaborated. Cubism and Italian Futurism were of significant importance in his paintings. |
 “Portrait of a man in a frock coat” The presented portrait from the collections of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków depicts an unidentified middle-aged man. |
 “Still Life” by Tomasz Lisiewicz The objects shown in the painting are props from Jan Matejko’s School of Historical Painting. Among the props painted by Lisiewicz, one can recognize the gilded mace presented on our website, which is still in the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (Rz A 107). |
Did you know that In the footsteps of the work of the author of “Our Lady of Myślenice” The author of “Our Lady of Myślenice” is Sebastian Stolarski (1798-1875), a painter known in the region, whose works can be found not only in the “Greek House”, but also during a walk around Myślenice and by visiting nearby churches.
His works can be found in the parish church and on Stradom in Myślenice, as well as in churches in Wiśniowa, Zakliczyn, Trzebunia, and Skomielna Biała.... |
Did you know that Artistic episode in Tadeusz Kościuszko’s life Could Tadeusz Kościuszko, the famous leader of the Uprising in 1794, have been a painter?
In the National Museum in Kraków, there are nudes made with a red-brown chalk (so-called sanguine) and watercolour panoramas of Rome painted by Kościuszko. |
Did you know that Difficulties with dating Piotr Michałowski's works Why are there difficulties with dating Piotr Michałowski’s works?
As a wealthy person, the artist did not put his works on sale. Consequently, he did not put signatures or dates on his works, making it difficult to ascertain the chronology of their production. |
Did you know that Ruben’s innovations Peter Paul Rubens developed a new type of equestrian portrait. The system that had been used up until then, in the Titian tradition (Horse portrait of Charles V), depicted a rider on a horse in profile. Rubens changed this, depicting the figure and mount slightly turned en trois quarts in a short perspective, so that they seemed to be heading directly towards the viewer. |
 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. |
 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, “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, “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, “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, “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. |
 Tomasz Baran, untitled The works made by Tomasz Baran seem to challenge the famous phrase emancipating the picture as an independent formal unit – they are a challenge to the flatness of the image and the order of colours that Denis recognized as one of the key properties. In his work, Baran analyses the issues of surface and colour, which are some of the basic elements building the form of the painting. By contradicting the traditional flatness of pictures, he brings painting closer to three-dimensional objects, he bends the loom, modifies the way it is attached to the canvas, trims painting edges in an irregular way, and creates spatial organisms by using them. In the work held in the Bunkier Sztuki collection, a sub-frame was created in a non-standard manner, which – apart from the place where canvas is stretched on a rectangular frame – was attached to two additional diagonally extending slats and to a cardboard layer covering the reverse of the painting, the elements inaccessible to the viewer’s eye. The outcome of this process is an uneven, spatial structure, consisting of convex and concave spots, usually absent from a smooth canvas plane. |
 Wilhelm Sasnal, untitled The picture of Wilhelm Sasnal presents a view of the burning Concorde aircraft. The artist recreated the frame from an amateur film made from a car window, which was the only video recording of the disaster at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in 2000. Presented for the first time at the exhibition, Scene 2000, at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the picture is part of a series of canvases by this artist connected with the subject of disasters and accidents. Despite the fact that Sasnal created a few pictures concerning the subject of the Concorde catastrophe (shown in the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery at the exhibition POPelita), each of them should be perceived as a separate work, and not a specific work cycle. Sasnal’s deep fascination with recordings showing the course of the catastrophe may indicate the artist’s desire to reach the “truth”, to spot what was hidden under the layer of words, descriptions, and interpretations. This pursuit is driven by the awareness of the impossibility of achieving the goal. |
Did you know that “Columbus egg”, that is, about drawing the thinnest line in painting An ancient historian from the 1st century — Pliny the Elder — in his 37-volume encyclopedia titled Natural history, compiled knowledge gathered from works of about 200 authors, thanks to which he preserved the echoes of lost writings and information about the Greek world for posterity, which included many stories concerning art. It was he who repeated the now famous anecdote about the dispute between Apelles — the greatest painter of his time — and another representative of this craft: Protogenes. Apelles — once he had heard of the fame of his competitor — went to Rhodes to see his works. However, he did not find the painter at home, while a board ready to be painted was set on the easel, watched by an old woman. When she asked Apelles who was visiting, the painter grabbed the brush and drew an extremely thin line through the centre of the painting, then he replied: “That’s who.” |
