2001-03-24 - Poland
Top 10 Polish Galleries 2000 by RASTER
RASTER is an independent (web) art magazine, clever, critical, updated, includes a lot of rare photographs and stories about current - not only art - events, mostly in Warsaw.
"This certainly hasn't been a bad year for art. At the end of it, all the newspapers, TV and radio broadcasts were full of art topics, they wrote and spoke about it; rather insensibly, in most cases. But perhaps all this means that art might become an important issue in Poland. The question remaining to be asked is: "But what kind of art?". For the time being, we have tried to answer another question: "Art - but where?" and created a list of ten leading Polish galleries for the year 2000. The sole fact that it was possible to make such a list, putting together big state institutions and small, or even short-lived private enterprises, does not speak well for the strength and wealth of Polish galleries. We've also encouraged our readers to send in their votes for the best gallery of the year, but they haven't shown the expected enthusiasm, and we received only three proposals. We can, therefore, quite honestly present the following list as the original work conceived by the weekly net magazine Raster. Our criteria are entirely subjective, based on our own judgements of the artistic quality of the events organised by particular institutions. We especially appreciated daring and radical decisions, breaking with the network habits or actions, which overcame the local problems in galleries situated in the provinces. We also took into consideration the way in which the galleries looked after their status, the publicity, and the public; how the galleries tempt people to visit them, even if one has to cover the distance of several hundred kilometres to get there. Common decency prevented us from including the Exhibition Room Bagatt - the gallery enclosed in the space of a cardboard box - and linked closely with our editorial team of Raster - in the list. Similarly, we decided not to evaluate the AMS Outdoor Gallery, as we're too closely connected to them to be sufficiently objective." for more, please visit the homepage.
Source: MT