MOCAK

Fifteen years, two aims

The museum’s own “about” page says MOCAK has for 15 years presented recent international art, education, and research and publishing projects. The two aims it prints are precise. One is to present the art of the last 20 years in the context of the postwar avant-garde and conceptualism. The other is to explain the sense of making art by pointing at its cognitive and ethical value and at its links with daily life. Projects are built for different audiences. A stated task is to reduce prejudice toward the newest art. MOCAK belongs to the International Council of Museums. The address is ul. Lipowa 4. The reception email is recepcja@mocak.pl and the phone is +48 12 263 40 00.

The visit is split by floor and by building, not by one circuit. Collection exhibitions are on level −1. Other shows, including temporary exhibitions, use building A and further rooms. A technical break in the Re Gallery, 13:30–14:00, takes that room offline for that half hour.

What the collection actually is

The collection page dates the museum to February 2010 and says the first works entered in that same year. It says that in fourteen years the museum acquired 5,590 works, entered under 1,571 inventory numbers, by 344 artists from Poland and elsewhere. One aim it prints is to collect and show Polish art of the second half of the 20th century against art from the rest of the world, which it ties to the museum’s statute. Another is to show the main currents of contemporary art. The about page’s “15 years” and this “fourteen years” are the two wordings on the two pages. They are not the same count.

The largest part of the holdings is the Galeria Potocka collection, given in two parts, in 2011 and in 2014. That collection began in the 1970s and was tied to Maria Anna Potocka’s effort to found a museum of contemporary art in Kraków. The page calls those works the core that later gifts and purchases were built around, and it says archive material came with the gift. In 2011 the heirs of Mikołaj Smoczyński gave his early and last paintings and a photographic archive of several thousand negatives and prints. The same year PKO BP gave a sculpture by Mirosław Bałka. Under the Ministry of Culture’s programme for national collections of contemporary art, the museum says it bought 363 works by Polish and foreign artists between 2011 and 2024.

Archives are a stated part of the holdings, not a side room. The page names the archives of Marian Eile, Władysław Hasior, Galeria Krzysztofory, Grupa Krakowska, Mieczysław Porębski and Mikołaj Smoczyński, plus an archive that covers every artist in the collection. Those files are press articles, exhibition reviews, catalogues, photographs, design papers and letters. The collection archive is described as still being added to, and as a base for research on contemporary art.