P o czet dziek anó w - Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Gdańsku

E L Ż B I E T A K A L
of PGS (the State Gallery) in Sopot, and the cancellation of the graduating exhibition
of Rafał Ewertowski in Baltic Centre of Culture – all these events, and not only these,
demonstrate that the phenomena that could be discussed or even negated but could
not be annulated were difficult to accept and were also feared. And, on the other hand,
that the contestation of the academic discourse is possible only if the discourse itself
does exist. The within makes the frame possible and meaningful, too, and the frame, on
the other hand, creates the necessary context for the inside. And the artistic activities of
the representatives of the painting of the Academy are not univocal and the departures
from the modernistic search for one truth towards postmodernist narrations of a smaller
format, as illustrated by the “mechanical” works of Roman Gajewski or the installations,
objects and photograms of Hanna Nowicka-Grochal, which are sometimes associated
with the so-called feminist current.
The often rewarded presence of the representatives of the older and the middle-aged professors’
body in the artistic life and on the stabilizing market of arts, on the one hand, and
the successes of Dominik Lejman, for instance, the representative of the next generation
of Gdańsk painters, confirmed by the Passport of Polityka Prize, on the other hand, prove
that the death of the easel painting, which is the symbol of academic education and its
status in the changing world, is neither necessary, nor inevitable. On the contrary, its perfection
of realization, guaranteed by that education, is being combined with the use of
the new pictorial means that have not been typical to the art of painting. The exhibitions
that took place simultaneously in Kraków in June of 1999: Municipal Maneuvers of Robert
Rumas (born in 1966) in the Zderzak Gallery, and the painting art of Władysław Jackiewicz
(born 1924) in the Artemis Gallery, can be quoted as the example and the symbol of a
different kind of consensus, the consensus of time and space, so to say.
non-art; that was is within, together with all the related phenomena, and sanctioned institutionally,
from that what is outside and do not belong to the Academy. And it was the
inside, the institution, or rather the aesthetical model thereof founded that shaped the
criteria of value, and determined whether the object could or could not be considered as
the representation of a certain artistic discipline. And it was the activity of the frame, the
situation of the outside of the institutional aesthetics – exemplified by works and acts of
Krechowicz, Haras, Czerwonka, Ostrogórski, Miszkin, Pereda, and the “Expressionists of
the 1980s”: Model, Bauć, Witkowski, Zaremba, and others – that could except or not the
process of the annexation of the new values. The area within the frame kept expanding,
and new strategies and ideas hitherto absent started to be recognized and included in the
academic discourse. Of course, they were further processed according to their individual
character. What is most essential, however, is the fact that the activity of the frame was
generated by the inside area, as it was being created by the graduates of the Academy.
The new activities that, owing to their scale and destructiveness, started to be labeled
as “the New Gdańsk School”, started to be more and more prominent in the 1990s. The
artists who graduated from the Academy settled in the “regained” territory like the Wyspa
Spichrzów Gallery, or later Łaźnia (Municipal Bath). They rejected the traditional painting
or sculpture, as well as the modernist call for the autonomy, and they included their
artistic activity in the social discourse. The activity of Grzegorz Klaman and other painters
who were the Academy graduates: Robert Rumas, Marek Rogulski, Piotr Wyrzykowski,
Jacek Staniszewski; the galleries and the foundations that they organized; the activity of
CUKT; the numerous editions of the AMS External Gallery – all these activities created a
new option for the official institutional and the aesthetical model. Adding to its importance
was the fact that it was convergent with the general trends in arts of that period.
A conflict around the CSW Łaźnia Gallery, conceptual changes regarding the activities