Wrocław Contemporary Museum and Foundation of Visual Arts are inviting to the monographic exhibition “Zygmunt Rytka. School of Seeing” – the first comprehensive presentation of the artist’s works after the compilation of his archive. Rytka is considered to be one of the most important Polish post-war artists. He is the author of almost 40 photographic series, over a dozen films and videos, huge documentation of artistic events, especially of the period of the independent culture of the 1980s. Since his debut in 1974, for over four decades, the artist has consistently pursued his own artistic programme, creating a fascinating work that is unprecedented in its scale and diversity. The Wrocław exhibition will present over a dozen author’s series from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, representing primarily the themes of perception, cognition and media manipulation.

The exhibition “Zygmunt Rytka. School of Seeing” provides an insight into the original artistic strategy of the artist, who continuously subjected the surrounding reality to artistic examination. The tools of this examination were, most of all, the photographic camera and the film and video camera. This research, based on intuition, was not a study in the scientific or theoretical sense, but a creative attitude and a constant dialogue with reality,

The Foundation for Visual Arts in collaboration with the Foundation for Contemporary Art In Situ carried out a long-term project of researching the work of Zygmunt Rytka and digitalising his archive (zygmuntrytka.pl). The exhibition at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum can be viewed from 7 July, marking the second stage of the project, which will be continued and concluded by a complementary show at the Museum of Art in Łódź, planned for 2023, and a monograph published by the prestigious Spector Books publishing house.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński