An exhibition featuring the largest collection of Polish art ever to be displayed in Ireland opens today at the National Gallery.
Paintings from Poland: Symbolism to Modern Art (1880-1939) comprises 74 paintings selected from the National Museum of Warsaw, with additional loans from private collections, the National Museum of Cracow and the Tatra Museum in Zakopane.
National Gallery staff saw the potential for an in-depth look at Polish works while researching the 2004 collection New Frontiers - Art from New EU Member States, said National Gallery director Raymond Keaveney.
"We visited the major galleries in Poland and met the personalities. We were hugely impressed and knew there was an opportunity to revisit Polish art more thoroughly."
Paintings from Poland and its catalogue represent a substantial contribution not just to Polish art in Ireland, but to the Polish art landscape more generally, he added. "It really is a monumental undertaking, and intellectually engages us in a dimension of Polish artwork that hadn't been fully explored."
The exhibition, organised in three sections, presents work created during, and strongly influenced by, a period of great national upheaval in Poland and one that ultimately shaped the nation's contemporary culture and identity.
The result, said curator Dr Dorota Folga-Januszewska, is paintings that represent "just how differently Polish artists interpreted the world from other European artists". Because the exhibition covers two generations, visitors will see the progression of younger artists who strove to disengage with history, experimenting in abstract art but later returning to the same problems of their teachers and reconstructing what they had learned from the masters, she added.
Works featured include Stanczykby Leon Wyczolkowski; Portrait of Painter Bronislaw Brykner in Fancy Costumeby Kazimierz Sabrowski; and Children's Trainand Abduction of a Princessby Witold Wojtkiewicz.