Truth Beauty Goodness. From The Zachęta Collection

artists: Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Marta Deskur, Zbigniew Dłubak, Janusz Kaczmarski, Jerzy Kałucki, Grzegorz Klaman, Marek Konieczny, Łukasz Korolkiewicz, Katarzyna Kozyra, Lech Kunka, Zbigniew Libera, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Agnieszka Polska, Joanna Przybyła, Joanna Rajkowska, Józef Robakowski, Erna Rosenstein, Robert Rumas, Jan Rylke, Jadwiga Sawicka, Kajetan Sosnowski, Henryk Stażewski, Alina Szapocznikow, Marian Szpakowski, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Jerzy Treliński, Małgorzata Turewicz-Lafranchi, Bogdan Anastazy Wiśniewski, Julita Wójcik, Jerzy Ryszard /Jurry/ Zieliński

curators: Hanna Wróblewska
cooperation: Julia Leopold and Robert Rumas

The famous platonic triad of the highest ideas and values is a quotation from one of the works presented at the exhibition: a photograph by Jadwiga Sawicka where this text is scratched into a plastic bottle. This title sounds somewhat ironic if we recall that these concepts are eagerly referred to by conservative critics when excoriating contemporary art for its lack of ideas and betrayal of ideals. But are they right? Perhaps, on the contrary, it is artists that stubbornly and resolutely still show us (critics and viewers) the often unwanted side of truth, by questioning goodness and beauty in their contemporary pop incarnations.
When the building of the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts (the word ‘Zachęta’ in Polish means ‘encouragement’) was finished in 1900, it was to serve for the presentation of a collection of current art, created by members of the society for the Warsaw public (and not only). The conceptual frame of the collection was created by the three names engraved on the building’s façade: Matejko, Chełmoński and Grottger.