This cross-sectional exhibition of Polish 20th and 21st century painting includes a wide range of works by outstanding Polish artists of different generations — representatives of the key currents of art history and contemporary artistic trends. The exhibition features, among others, contemporary classics, artists representing conceptual attitudes, educators and experimenters, as well as artistic personalities that are worth reminding to the broader audience, who are now relegated to the sidelines of art history.

Art in Our Age is an exhibition of works from the collections of the ING Polish Art Foundation and Zachęta — National Gallery of Art. The exhibition confronts the activities of contemporary artists with the fundamental questions that those visiting their exhibitions ask themselves: has today’s art totally divorced itself from reality? Who are contemporary artists and why do we call the effects of their activities works of art? What does the abstract explorations of the artistic avant-garde have in common with the lives of ordinary people?

A presentation at the Zachęta workshop room recapitulates project Musical Images in which students of one of Warsaw’s secondary schools participated throughout the school year as part of an individually. The meetings at Zachęta provided an opportunity to become familiar with new instrumental techniques, contemporary composers and musical literaturę in confrontation with art history and contemporary art works.

The exhibition concentrates only on the problem of the world of animals, exploring artists' diverse takes on this problem and the range of ways of visualizing it in art. The point of entry for the exhibition is the desire to overcome the dogmatic anthropocentrism that places the human in the centre of the world as a privileged species of the highest ontological status. This viewpoint continues to dominate in contemporary science, and as a consequence we witness the exclusion of other species/phenomena of life on earth from the sphere of scientific knowledge in terms of their subjectivity or rights.          

Włodzimierz Pawlak (born 1957) – painter, performer, poet, art theoretician, member of Gruppa (one of the most important artistic collectives of the 1980s) – had until now never had either a comprehensive solo exhibition or an exhaustive publication about his work. The Zachęta show will be the first retrospective presentation of the artist’s oeuvre, covering the years 1984-2008.