Marta Zboralska

At Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Maciej Cholewiński introduced us to the institution’s library collections. They include the personal correspondence of key figures in twentieth-century Polish art, a selection of which was on display inside a dedicated vitrine. Maciej also hand-picked other archival materials relevant to the interests of our group – such as the pamphlet issued by the Łódź branch of Solidarity for Construction in Process, the 1981 exhibition discussed during the presentations the day before.

We then had the privilege of being shown around the museum’s open storage by Paulina Kurc-Maj. Few of the paintings we saw were straight-forwardly Socialist Realist, instead complicating the coherence of this category. Some of the period’s inherent contradictions were exemplified by Władysław Strzemiński’s study for a wall relief entitled Colonial Exploitation, made during 1949: the year that both followed the opening and preceded the destruction of the famous Neoplastic Room. As we toured the Room’s reconstruction with Daniel Muzyczuk, we had the opportunity to reflect on the historical intersections of figuration and abstraction – or the plasticity of this very dichotomy.