Galeria Labirynt was established in 1956 as the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions ( or ) in
Lublin
Lublin is List of cities and towns in Poland, the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the centre of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin i ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
. It presents a variety of art disciplines including installations, video art, performance art, multimedia, photography, film, art, building, painting, and drawing.
History
Galeria Labirynt was founded in 1956 as the BWA.
In 1981 Andrzej Mroczek became the director of BWA. In the gallery he continued to pursue the first program that he had led since 1974. Galeria Labirynt promoted contemporary art, focusing on the formal experiment.
BWA gained nationwide and worldwide recognition as an artists’ meeting place. After the introduction of
martial law in Poland
Martial law in Poland () existed between 13 December 1981 and 22 July 1983. The Polish United Workers' Party, government of the Polish People's Republic drastically restricted everyday life by introducing martial law and a military junta in an a ...
, BWA was one of the few government institutions not under a
boycott
A boycott is an act of nonviolent resistance, nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organisation, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for Morality, moral, society, social, politics, political, or Environmenta ...
. This was evidence of the trust that independent Polish artistic milieus had for the director, Andrzej Mroczek.
In 2010 Waldemar Tatarczuk became the new director of BWA. Similar to Andrzej Mroczek, he added his ideas of a
Performance Art Centre, run by him in the years 1999 – 2010, to the gallery's program. Tatarczuk changed the name of the gallery from BWA to Galeria Labirynt. The name in English means Labyrinth Gallery.
As of 2012, Galeria Labirynt mainly follows the path established by Andrzej Mroczek — presenting the classics of contemporary art and works of the artists linked with his program, taking an in-depth look at present day works of art, and searching for universal values in art.
Artists
Polish artists whose work was presented in the Labyrinth Gallery include:
Cezary Bodzianowski,
Janusz Baldyga,
Miroslaw Balka,
Basia Bańda,
George Beres,
Hubert Czerepok,
Maurice Gomulicki,
Gruppa,
Marek Kijewski,
Circle Klipsa,
Marek Konieczny,
Zofia Kulik
Zofia Kulik (born 1947 in Wrocław, Poland) is a Polish artist living and working in Łomianki (Warsaw), whose art combines political criticism with a feminist perspective.
Career
Kulik studied at the Sculpture Department of the Warsaw Acade ...
,
Przemyslaw Kwiek,
Elzbieta Jablonska,
Zbigniew Libera,
Natalia LL
Natalia Lach-Lachowicz (18 April 1937 – 12 August 2022) was a Polish artist who worked with paint, photography, drawing, performance, and video art. Sean O'Hagan (journalist), Sean O'Hagan, writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2017, described her as ...
,
Maria Pinińska-Beres,
Zygmunt Piotrowski,
Joseph Robakowski,
Jan Swidzinski,
Iza Tarasewicz,
Zbigniew Warpechowski, and
Krzysztof Zarebski.
The non-Polish artists whose work was presented in the Labyrinth Gallery include:
Stuart Brisley
Stuart Brisley (born 1933) is a British artist.
Education
Brisley studied at Guildford School of Art from 1949 to 1954 and at the Royal College of Art from 1956 to 1959. In 1959–60 he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Ge ...
,
Michael Snow
Michael James Aleck Snow (December 10, 1928 – January 5, 2023) was a Canadian artist who worked in a range of media including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. His best-known films are ''Wavelength'' (1967) and '' La Rég ...
,
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
,
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...
, and
Christo
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landmarks a ...
.
Notes
External links
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Contemporary art galleries in Poland
Art museums and galleries in Poland
Buildings and structures in Lublin
1956 establishments in Poland
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