Galeria aTAK is of age! It has turned 18 and boasts over 70 exhibitions and accompanying publications. The gallery's owner, Krzysztof Musiał, has invited and hosted contemporary creators, postgraduate artistic youth, and classics ‒ including the important Paris Committee in his collection. During this exhibition journey, the title of one of the exhibitions provoked the question "Where is painting?" It was an exhibition of students from the studios of Leon Tarasewicz and Paweł Susid (July 6‒September 15, 2012). The gallery's years of experience, supported by conversations and feedback from visitors, emboldened us to answer with this exhibition ‒ "Here is painting!" 🎨 The inspiration for proposing and organizing this exhibition, apart from the paintings that caught our attention during the diploma presentations at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, is precisely the history of exhibitions at Galeria aTAK. Among the promoters or reviewers invited to this presentation of graduates were artists ‒ now faculty members of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw ‒ whose exhibitions were organized by Galeria aTAK: Stanisław Baj, Grzegorz Kozera, Igor Przybylski, and Antoni Starowieyski. 🖼️ We will showcase works by this year's graduates of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: - Mateusz Brzozowski - Anna Markowska - Aleksandra Ochońska - Bartłomiej Płoszajski As the exhibition's curator, Dr. Grzegorz Kozera, wrote: "The selection of diploma paintings provides a good opportunity to contemplate various aesthetics. Aleksandra Ochońska's canvases, despite traditional still-life motifs, have the potential to be interpreted as landscapes. This approach, to paint genres other than landscapes, was often encouraged in Jan Cybis's <<Painting Notes>> — a distinguished painter and an important figure for the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Anna Markowska's paintings, with their compositional and color discipline, teach attentiveness and the discovery of richness in apparent formal limitations. Mateusz Brzozowski's works, with their landscape themes, simultaneously carve out their own path in the rich tradition of landscape painting and discreetly reference the tradition of plein-air sessions once organized by Galeria aTAK. Bartłomiej Płoszajski's canvases bring together rather distant elements: abstraction and figuration, the world of nature and mechanics, as well as art history and contemporary expression. The associations with automotive themes in Andrzej Wróblewski's works, which are perceptible in these canvases, do not exhaust all the car-related contexts present here. It is worth recalling that on March 15, 1924, at Mazowiecka 11, the current address of Galeria aTAK, the avant-garde group Blok held its first exhibition in the automobile showroom of Laurin & Klement. The few interpretative paths outlined here, of course, do not exhaust all possibilities for interpreting the presented paintings. I encourage personal engagement with these creative attitudes and the discovery of numerous aesthetic and meaningful qualities in the works. Finally, I will recall the thought of Prof. Teresa Grzybkowska, also a friend of the gallery, who in her text <<The Unknown Polish Hermes>> from 2023 reminded us that "viewing with a close person enhances the pleasure of shared experience of a great work of art." I am convinced that the undeniable beauty of these canvases and the genius loci of Galeria aTAK will contribute to such experiences and bring us new artistic connections. The catalog will also include statements by Prof. Stanisław Baj, Dr. Igor Przybylski, and Dr. Antoni Biberstein-Starowieyski.
