Zachęta National Gallery of Art

curator: Karol Radziszewski
cooperation on behalf of Zachęta: Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek, Joanna Egit-Pużyńska

To Pee in a Bun is the fifth presentation of a selection of works from the Zachęta collections. At the exhibition can be seen works either rarely or never before seen. The exhibition’s curator Karol Radziszewski – has made a subjective selection and reinterpretation of works, placing them in new and at times surprising contexts.                            

To Pee in a Bun is a quotation taken from a classic figure of Polish conceptualism, Edward Krasiński. The artist once wrote a short poem:

WOULDN’T IT BE FUN
TO PEE IN A BUN.                                     

Zachęta is the owner of a unique work by Krasiński – a project prepared for a monographic exhibition in 1997. This is a spatial arrangement of photographic reproductions on a scale of 1:1 of Jan Matejko’s Battle of Grunwald and other paintings that were part of Zachęta’s pre-war collections. Making reference to this installation at the exhibition, the curator presents his own “collection within a collection”. Krasińskis’s work is also the point of entry for a very general reflection on the relation and scope of the concepts ARTIST and CURATOR.               

The exhibition To Pee in a Bun focuses primarily on the painting collections, and also on more rarely presented graphic works, particularly from the 60s and 70s, with particular attention paid to diverse approaches to the female nude.                       

The curator has made numerous interventions in the arrangement of the exhibition itself, establishing a playful relationship with the space of the gallery and the works on show, but at the same time posing a question as to the status and character of the collection. Radziszewski, a graduate of the Painting Department of the Academy of the Fine Arts in Warsaw admits:

I treated the works of other artists as ingredients in a greater whole, a bit like tubes of paint from which I squeezed out colours to paint a single, composite image.

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