Foksal Gallery Collection

In its first decade of operation, the cofounders of the Foksal Gallery openly questioned such concepts as “collection” and “museum.” The artists and critics associated with this avant-garde gallery founded in Warsaw in 1966 challenged the mechanisms of art institutions, such as the commercialization of conceptual practices and the building of hierarchies. In a key text for the operation of the Foksal Gallery, written by the founders in 1966 and titled “Introduction to the general theory of PLACE,” they phrased their demands as follows: “PLACE cannot be bought or collected. PLACE cannot be arrested. PLACE cannot be known.”

Despite its critical attitude toward institutional tools and practices, the gallery became steadily overgrown with artefacts left by artists after completing their exhibitions. From 1976 onward, the growing collection of works was already an important item on the agenda, as demonstrated by several documents retained in the Foksal Gallery Archive. In 1977, in a letter to the Ministry of Culture and Art, Foksal Gallery cofounder Wiesław Borowski presented plans for establishing a Permanent Collection of Works of Contemporary Art: “We picture creation of the collection as follows: 1. the need to gather works in the form of a) purchases, b) gifts, c) loans, d) reconstructions, e) duplications, f) ascribing the rank of unique artistic items to documents, publications, relics, etc.” In an October 1979 letter to the management of the Visual Arts Studios, organizer of the Foksal Gallery at that time, Borowski even stated: “The Foksal Gallery should gradually abandon its current exhibition practice and transform itself into a museum institution, with its own library, archive and collection. … In its new form, the gallery would show its permanent collections and organize temporary individual and thematic exhibitions….” Despite systematic efforts to obtain funds and a place to store and work with the collections, no institutional framework for the collection was created. The collection was placed on loan with the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2001, where it remained until 2017. After termination of the loan agreement, the collection was turned over to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The Foksal Gallery Collection, comprising over 800 objects, was not built methodically. Initially it arose on the margins of exhibition activity, mainly in the form of works left at the gallery after the exhibitions were over. Much of the collection was made up of archival photographs and selections from theoretical texts and manifestos, which were printed on fiberboard for presentation in a series of exhibitions in 1979 in Dublin, Edinburgh, London and Glasgow. Exhibition designs and documentation were also framed, thus shifting them from the realm of archival items towards works of art. In the 1990s the gallery managed to purchase about twenty painted works by artists such as Leon Tarasewicz, Zbigniew Gostomski, Tomasz Tatarczyk, Maria Stangret and Kōji Kamoji, but the purchase of works was the exception not the rule. Most of the Foksal Gallery Collection is made up of gifts and materials prepared for external exhibitions. Alongside works by artists such as Christian Boltanski, Lars Englund, Annette Messager, Edward Narkiewicz and Mikołaj Smoczyński, it includes paint rollers used by Andrzej Szewczyk and printing sleeves used by Mirosław Bałka in artistic activity at the exhibition Bureaucracy in 2001. Consequently, the collection is amorphous, and in itself is testimony to the intellectual path of the Foksal Gallery as well as the fate of an artistic institution active during the communist era in Poland, the period of post-communist transformation, and contemporary times.

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