In Black and White - 200 Years of Drawing at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts

Exhibition In Black and White - 200 Years of Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of establishing the oldest school of art in our country that was held last year. The exhibition will show almost 170 drawings, from the collections of the National Museum in Krakow, the Academy of Fine Arts and from private collections.

The drawing medium has been chosen for a reason. For centuries, drawing has been the basis of academic education and a test of technical skill, playing both an auxiliary role in relation to other artistic techniques, as well as being an independent artistic expression.

The drawing was and still is used by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow: painters, sculptors, graphic artists, designers, architects and art conservators. The viewers of the exhibition will thus have a chance to familiarise themselves with the stylistic changes that drawing has undergone in the past two centuries as well as understand its meanings and functions in a better way. The exhibition will show drawings in the form of academic studies (nudes, draperies), sketches being preparations for bigger painting or sculpture compositions, design drawings, or drawings made while stocktaking. The biggest group are drawings considered to be independent works by their authors, revealing not only the arcana of their techniques but also giving an insight into their personal experiences or observed reality. The exhibition will also feature sketchbooks, probably the most intimate form of expression that the artists are not always willing to share with the public.

Among the works displayed at the exhibition, there will be drawings by authors who were famous within their lifetime, but also by unacknowledged artists. There will also be drawings by such masters as Jan Matejko, Leon Wyczółkowski, Wojciech Weiss, Xawery Dunikowski, Mieczysław Wejman or Adam Hoffmann. 

Agnieszka Jankowska-Marzec


Curators of the exhibition: Agnieszka Jankowska- Marzec, Światosław Lenartowicz

Coordinator: Katarzyna Stolarz

Interior designer: Magdalena Bujak