Zbigniew Libera archive

The Archive of Zbigniew Libera on Museum of Modern Art website is a collection of around two thousands of object from artist's childhood and youth (that is, from the 1960s till early 1990s).

The collected documentation is an in-depth and detailed presentation of how Libera's personality has constituted and how the main areas of his artistic interests, which will reappear in his more mature works, have crystallised.

Looking at Libera's early work we could follow several sources of his key motives: death, destruction, sexuality and societal oppression. The archive is of unique character: the artist, in a radical gesture makes public nearly all of his preserved documents, photographs and videos up until the year 1991. We present known, iconic works such as Intimate rites, Mystical Perserveration, or How Girls Are Tamed. Side by side to them, we show photographs from his family album, artistic life documentation (so-called Attic and Culture of Gathering in Łódź), photograph and press cuttings collection gathered by Libera as his inspiration and work material.

In collection “Prison, 1982” we can see the documentation preapred by Libera in prison for political prisoners in Hrubieszów, where he served his time for printing and distribitiong of politically oppositional materials. Several preserved prints are historical, unique memories of that time.

A separate category are „Inedits“, i.e works which the artist decided to make available, despite they are unfnished, never before used or, for different reasons, rejected by the artist, and also a photographic documentation of Zbigniew Libera's travel to North Africa and Israel between 1989 and 1990.
 

Curators: Kaja Kowalska, Maciej Wołosiuk