Exhibitions in the "4 x Modernity" series, organized by the National Museum in Krakow, have become a permanent fixture on the map of Krakow's cultural events in recent years. The series of exhibitions, whose originator is the acting director of the MNK, Prof. Andrzej Szczerski, has taken us through four periods that defined Polish modernity. With the end of 2024, the procession of exhibitions presenting Polish art of recent years entered the final stretch of its route - for visitors opened "Transformations. Modernity in the Third Republic". The exhibition was sponsored by A&B - we invite you to visit!
Unlike the previous exhibitions in the series, "Transformations" seems to have the least problematic character. Instead, the curators decided to divide the exhibition space into three chapters that present the most important design paradigms of the last 35 years. Thus, visiting the exhibition, we will pass through rooms devoted successively to postmodern art, then to neo-modernism, which took over Polish fine and design arts with the first several years of the new millennium, ending the story in the section called by the curatorial team "Multivoice", presenting various artistic phenomena of the last decades.
The entrance area of the exhibition - on the left, a photograph from the series "Studencki Kraków", Tomasz Łojewski
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow
postmodernism for everyone!
The postmodern section greets viewers with a grim vision of the city of the future, created by Kobas Laksa, in which the abandoned Rondo 1 office building in Warsaw has been turned into a columbarium surrounded by tombstones of transformation victims. The rest of this section of the exhibition is much more optimistic in nature. Postmodernism as a total creative attitude and the result of the post-transformation explosion of creative energy in the post-transformation era appears here in its full glory. Importantly, the exhibition shows how aesthetics, full of formal disinclination, took over not only the architecture of luxury department stores or designs of exclusive furniture, but also objects filling the homes of the broad masses of the population - there are POP starters (designed by Andrzej Antoniuk), Zelmer brand slicers (designed by Ergo Design) or "Łaciate" milk packaging (designed by Leszek Ziniewicz). People who grew up in the 80s and 90s will feel at home here.
View of the "Postmodernism" chapter - on the left, the design of the "Now Poland" logotype by Prof. Henryk Chylinski Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © shared courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow 
A ruler, pencil and crayon - this is an architect's toolbox
A real feast for the eyes, but also an interesting lesson on the multidimensionality of the postmodern turn, are the architectural drawings with which it was decided to present a significant part of the buildings created during this period. Colorful sketches by Romuald Loegler, Stefan Müller or Stanislaw Niemczyk breathe optimism proper to postmodernism, and are also an expression of the technical mastery of the artists of the 1990s. Watching the exhibition, one can feel a certain longing for aesthetic extravagance, which contemporary visuals clearly lack. What is surprising, instead, is the absence of visualizations created at a time when access to 3D imaging technology was a novelty for architects and female architects, and when technological constraints led to the creation of unusual aesthetics that were not infrequently picked up by a pop culture fascinated by the visuality of infancy digitization.
A view of the chapter "Postmodernism"
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © provided courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow
An interesting case study against this backdrop is the presentation of the Higher Seminary of the Resurrectionist Fathers in Cracow, by Dariusz Kozłowski. The building, which is an icon of postmodern construction, was presented not by means of photographs or architectural drawings, like the other buildings in the exhibition, but by means of a period-era architectural mock-up and one-of-a-kind painting sketches, which the artist called Prenatal Architecture.
A view of the "Neomodernism" chapter
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © provided courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow
long duration or march of -isms?
Already in the first section of the exhibition one can feel what Anna Cymer signaled with the title of her book on postmodern architecture. The vividness of the creative attitudes developed after 1989 goes beyond notions of style or rigid timeframes - that's why the postmodern section, right next to the Elbląg retroversy, initiated by the 1980s, presents not only the BRE Bank headquarters, but also the building of the city. The postmodern section is therefore presented not only with the BRE Bank headquarters in Bydgoszcz, designed in 1998 by Andrzej Bulanda and Włodzimierz Mucha, but also the Plato Gallery in Ostrava by KWK Promes studios, opened to the public less than three years ago. The situation is similar in the case of the next two chapters of the exhibition - in each of them we will encounter juxtapositions that are unexpected not only from a typological perspective, but also from a temporal perspective. Thus, postmodernism, neomodernism and polyglot are not in "Transformations" closed eras with clearly defined boundaries, but rather methods of dealing with the problems facing artists and designers.
A view of the chapter "Neomodernism" - on the right the carpet "Masterplan" from the series "Light of the Lodge", Joanna Rajkowska Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © provided courtesy of the National Museum in Cracow 
neomodernist triumph
The triumphant return of modernist design in the second chapter of the exhibition presents realizations in the fields of fine arts, design and construction. In the field of architecture, these are primarily spectacular and award-winning realizations by renowned artists. An important role is played here by mock-ups - thanks to them, curious visitors will learn about the layout of the inner courtyard of the Aatrial House or see from all sides the futuristic shape of the main building of the Polish Antarctic Station, whose design was created by the Kurylowicz&Associates studio.
view of the "Polyphony" chapter - in the foreground the interactive installation "Game of Letters", Karolina Wiktor
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © shared courtesy of the National Museum in Cracow
The bold visions of Polish male and female architects emphatically demonstrate how quickly, after the beginning of the transformation , domestic design reached a world-class level, without losing its individual character, embedded in the local context. At this point, it is difficult to find better examples than Przemo Lukasik's Bolko Loft, built on the framework of an old lamppost at the Bolko shaft, or the house in Katowice Podlesie, designed by the jojko+nawrocki duo, which refers to the archetypes of single-family housing.
view of the chapter "Polyphony" - on the left the work "Habitat", by Katarzyna Józefowicz
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © shared courtesy of the National Museum in Cracow
report from the present
The attempt to define the latest phenomena had to be fraught with many difficulties - as Prof. Andrzej Szczerski points out in the exhibition catalog, one should not forget that the final form of presentation of these phenomena is the result not only of an in-depth search of various forms of documentation of post-1989 artistic activity, but also of a personal interpretation of these mechanisms, the subjectivity of which inevitably stems from the fact of direct observation and research conducted "on the fly" by members of the curatorial team. Nonetheless, the first two parts of the exhibition refer to terms that are well-established in the debate on post-89 art. A new term that the curators introduced in their story is "Polyphony," which is a summary of the diverse attitudes that characterize the phenomena occurring in the field of art and design in the last few years.
A view of the "Polyphony" chapter
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © provided courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow
pre to modulo!
Unlike postmodernism, which is relatively well-defined by discourse, and neomodernism, which has long appeared as a rather homogeneous style formation, "Polyphony" is a fresh, authorial look at recent art, which is why the last section of the exhibition was organized in a slightly different way from the previous chapters. The exhibits have been grouped into sub-sections that present the various developments present in design and fine arts - so there are issues of local identity, relationship with nature, accessibility or social solidarity. In most of these sections, architecture is reflected - whether in the form of projects and finished realizations, as in the case of the Stone Educational Pavilion by the em4 Brataniec studio or the Warsaw Social District, designed by BBGK Architects, or works of aof a critical nature, such as Katarzyna Józefowicz's Habitat , in which the artist reflects on contemporary models of residence in structures built before the transformation, or the observations of the landscape of Polish suburbs, painted by Rafał Bujnowski in the series Polish Houses.
View of the chapter "Polyphony"
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © shared courtesy of the National Museum in Cracow
Significant for the overtones of this chapter is its opening by the visual identity project for the BETON Film Festival, in which Robert Mendel and Jacek Walesiak arrange forms from Corbusier's modulor that are far from the model of man imagined by the pope of modernism. The multiplicity of possibilities, creative attitudes and the needs of contemporary audiences is what in "Transformations" characterizes the work of recent years.
"The End of Radio," by Konrad Smolenski
Photo: Kacper Trzmiel © shared courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow
a journey through contemporaneity
Although the exhibition "Transformations. Modernity in the Third Republic" concludes the series implemented at the National Museum in Krakow since 2021, the experience gathered during its organization will hopefully not be in vain. The curatorial team announces that the exhibitions will serve as the basis for a permanent exhibition in the planned Museum of Architecture and Design in the former Cracovia Hotel, whose future is still uncertain. Regardless of the outcome of efforts to create a new branch of the National Museum in Cracow, the latest exhibition in the "4 x Modernity" series, like the previous ones, will probably go down in thehistory of Polish exhibiting as an important attempt to define "Polishness" not through martyrdom or longing for the glorious episodes of the past, but the dominant role of the drive toward modernity that has characterized Poland for the past 130 years.
The exhibition can be viewed at the National Museum in Cracow from Tuesday to Sunday during opening hours until May 18, 2025. For more on the process of its creation, the methodology adopted by the curatorial team and the phenomena that did not find their place in the exhibition, read the interview with Prof. Andrzej Szczerski, which will appear in the upcoming issue of A&B.
