Lviv Women

In the introduction to his groundbreaking work Radical Eye, Professor Andrzej Turowski identifies World War I as a key formative event in the history of modernism—an event that also “revealed separate areas of male and female experience”. This notion resonates with the exhibition Lviv Women, which, however, broadens the perspective beyond that of “crisis and destruction”, extending it to include the traumatic events associated with World War II—both those that preceded and followed it. These events were particularly dramatic and painful within the local context of Lviv, as well as in the lives of each of the Lviv-based women artists whose works are featured in the exhibition. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ongoing since 2022, perpetuates, prolongs, and reactivates traumatic experiences that once seemed consigned to the past under the banner of “never again”.

The exhibition, presented at the Main Building of the National Museum in Krakow, has another equally important point of departure: the curator selected the works in full awareness of the absence of a coherent and comprehensive narrative of Lviv’s art history—particularly regarding the interwar period. Following the devastation of World War II, independent narratives emerged in art history focusing on artists from the three main ethnic communities living in Lviv at the time: Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian. Each of these narratives acknowledges a shared heritage or invokes the image of Lviv as a proverbial national melting pot. Lviv Women seeks to present the interwar artistic community of Lviv as a unified group while simultaneously highlighting the variety of individual artistic attitudes and stylistic approaches within it.

The exhibition is held at the "XX + XXI. Galeria Sztuki Polskiej" gallery, in the "Curator’s Choice" space.

Curator: Andrij Bojarov
Coordinator: Ewelina Zając