Books published by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

With Art in a Disrupted World, art historian Agata Pietrasik presents a study of artistic practices that emerged in Poland during and after World War II. Pietrasik highlights examples of artworks by a number of Polish-born artists that were created in concentration camps and ghettos, in exile, and during the years of social, political, and cultural disintegration immediately following the war. She draws attention to the ethics of artistic practice as a method of fighting to preserve one‿s own humanity amid even the most dehumanizing circumstances. Breaking out of entrenched historical timelines and traditional forms of narration, this book brings together drawings, paintings, architectural designs, and exhibitions, as well as literary and theatrical works created in this time period, to tell the story of Polish life in wartime. ‿Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists‿including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna‿whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences. Â

This catalog accompanies the first retrospective exhibition devoted to the Albanian painter, Edi Hila, one of the last neglected masters from Eastern Europe.

The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Central and Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for Kinetic and Op Art. As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including Pop, minimalism, and conceptualism another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.

Thanks to its very nature, performance enters into natural dialogue with art, new media, politics, and the social sphere as a whole. Always happening in the here and now, and with a unique freedom and openness to the unknown, performance is a medium with a special ability to question its own subjects, materials, and languages. As a result, it is often best reflected in the dynamic character of contemporary art and contemporaneity in the broadest sense of the word. Points of Convergence explores these ideas and investigates critical approaches to performance, ultimately aiming to stimulate new discussion between theorists and practitioners. With twelve essays by leading figures in the field of performance arts, this illustrated volume is structured in two parts. The first, authored by academics in the discipline, features an introduction to key areas of scholastic research. The second part, authored by curators and other researchers, then focuses on an account of individual traditions of performance. Taken together, the contributions identify new possibilities for interaction between the theoretical aspects of performance art and the ways performance plays out within local contexts.

Consciousness Neue Bieremiennost was an art group formed in the mid-1980s in Poland by three sculptors: Miroslaw Balka, Miroslaw Filonik, and Marek Kijewski. This volume recreates the history of the group and its often fleeting creations and sets it in the context of Polish life and politics of the 1980s and the artistic scene it spawned.

One of Poland's most important and independent postwar artists, Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-57) created his own highly individual, suggestive, and prolific form of abstract and figurative painting. This volume offers a fresh presentation and thorough reevaluation of his work and its legacy in the international context of art history.

A volume that coins the term "Team 10 East" as a conceptual tool to discuss the work of Team 10 members and fellow travelers from state-socialist countries - such as Oskar Hansen of Poland, Charles Polonyi of Hungary, and Radovan Niksic of Yugoslavia.

In the late 1960s and '70s, artists in Yugoslavia rejected the official language of expression licensed by the regime, abstract art, and replaced it with "anti-art". This book explores this crucial period in the Yugoslav art scene and situates it in the broader cultural context of Central and Eastern Europe.

Ion Grigorescu, born in 1945 in Bucharest and educated as a painter, was one of the first Romanian conceptual artists and advocates of anti-art, postulating a radical consolidation of artistic activities with quotidian life. This book considers the oeuvre of Grigorescu.

By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past few years. It brings to light the important work of Russian artists today and to explicate the political environment that has given rise to such work.