Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Sylwia Serafinowicz, PhD
collaboration on the part of Zachęta: Maria Świerżewska
collaboration on the part of the ING Polish Art Foundation: Kamila Bondar
organizers: The ING Polish Art Foundation, Zachęta — National Gallery of Art
artists: Adam Adach, Janina Baranowska, Lisa Barnard, Agata Bogacka, Tymek Borowski, Olaf Brzeski, Paweł Dziemian, Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka, Grupa Twożywo, Lutz Hatzor, Marthe Hekimi, Josef Herman, Piotr Janas, Paweł Jarodzki, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Łukasz Korolkiewicz, Tomasz Kowalski, Janek Koza, Róża Litwa , Marcin Maciejowski, Przemysław Matecki, Paulina Ołowska, Lola Paprocka, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Karol Radziszewski, Joanna Rajkowska, Inken Reinert, Zbigniew Rogalski, Wilhelm Sasnal, Tim Smith, Alina Szapocznikow , Radek Szlaga, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Paweł Śliwiński, Franciszka Themerson, Alex Urban, Wojciech Zasadni, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski, Marek Żuławski

The backbone of the exhibition Wild at Heart is the collection of the ING Polish Art Foundation which gathers the works by Polish living artists created post 1990. The precision of the spatial and temporal framework of this collection determines its content which focuses on the Polish scene during the social and economic transformation (following the fall of communism in 1989). The exhibition brings attention to the portraits and self-portraits executed in the medium of painting. It focuses on those which in a very literal way embraced the attributes of wealth such as Western cars, euro banknotes, the magazines bearing such titles as Businessman and Success, as well as on those which escape figuration and project the wilderness of heart mentioned in the title of this show. Consequently, the exhibition allows us to investigate how the experience of the open borders and emigration influenced the ways in which we perceive ourselves and how the medium of painting addressed this issue.

^{Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, The Painter's Eye, 2005 / oil, canvas / 40x40 cm / no. 0067, from the collection of The ING Polish Art Foundation}