Artists’ Archives of the Museum of Modern Art are pleased to provide access to the Archive of Fine Art Prints of the Exchange Gallery owned by Józef Robakowski. It is a part of the Archive and Collection of the Exchange Gallery donated to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by Józef Robakowski.
The Archive has a unique character. It includes publications from the years 1987 – 2017. It is not a presentation of current publishing productions from the last forty years, but a collection deliberately selected and compiled by the artist (and an art historian), an individual story about Polish and international neo-avant-garde art as well as art after 1990.
The Exchange Gallery was opened in 1978 in the apartment of Małgorzata Potocka located at Piłsudskiego Street in Łódź. The apartment-gallery was a place of exchange of ideas, works and art publications. It has never been transformed into a museum as nobody expressed such ambitions. As Józef Robakowski said, the Exchange Gallery was a “place of initiatives”, where, additionally, fine art prints and works were presented; a place which was visited by artists, art historians and critics from Poland and abroad. The visitors were offered a guest room which was used for example by Valie Export, Paul Sharits, Jiří Valoch, Orlan or Stefania and Franciszek Themerson. On the apartment walls Robakowski hung a collection of minor and “poor” papers published by artists in a few or a few dozen copies to which nobody paid attention. Such gesture was motivated by the need to show respect to something which has not yet achieved the status of art. Since the Exchange Gallery was an anticommercial initiative, it was deprived of a material aspect.
Artists’ Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has provided access to 220 publications presented in the form of over two thousand and five hundred digital mappings of published pages. They include journals and art magazines, artists’ editions and works, catalogues of exhibitions and events, theoretical texts and art guides.
The following artists, art groups, art galleries and periodicals are presented in the first showing of the archive:
Wacław Antczak, Leszek Brogowski, Witosław Czerwonka, Zbigniew Dłubak, Henryk Gajewski, ZERO-61 Group, Gruppa, Marek Janiak, Wolf Kahlen, Taka Iimura, Tomasz Konart, Andrzej Kostołowski, Joseph Kosuth, Krzysztof Krauze, Jacek Kryszkowski, Paweł Kwiek, KwieKulik, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Andrzej Lachowicz, Zbigniew Libera, Marek Łebkowski, Marek Łopata, Łódź Kaliska, Maria Nordman, Jolanta Marcolla, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Géza Parneczky, Andrzej Partum, Jacek Rydecki, Józef Robakowski, Andrzej Różycki, Piotr Rypson, Adam Rzepecki, Tomasz Sawicki, Guy Schraenen, Tomasz Sikorski, Jan Świdziński, Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, Jerzy Truszkowski, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Warsztat Formy Filmowej, Maria Waśko, Anastazy B. Wiśniewski, Jan Wojciechowski, Krzysztof Zarębski
Poetry Office, Arcus Gallery, EL Gallery, Labyrinth Gallery, Permafo Gallery, „po” Gallery, Pro/la Gallery, Remont Gallery, Gallery of Recent Art, Trace Gallery, Contemporary Gallery, Exchange Gallery, Znak Gallery,
Artpool Letter, Personal Letter of the Artistic Arrangement Schistosoma, Tango
Curators: Robert Jarosz, Magdalena Drągowska
Cooperation: Adrian Antoniewicz, Michał Buczek, Karolina Kłaczyńska, Weronika Krzemień, Zofia Machowska, Marta Masłowska, Marlena Mówińska, Monika Orpik, Karolina Piwińska, Weronika Przymorska, Barbara Rękawek, Sandra Roczeń, Bartosz Stawiarski, Bogna Stefańska, Konstancja Święcka, Kacha Szaniawska, Justyna Szymańska, Bernard Wnuk, Monika Zaleszczuk, Patrycja Zwolińska, Justyna Żmijewska
Special thanks to: Sylwia Borowska-Monkiewicz