“Ways of Seeing”

The Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź holds a key place in the history of twentieth-century modernist museology. Established in 1931 from a behest to the city by the a.r. group (the artists Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and Henryk Stażewski, and the poets Julian Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski), the museum was part of the first wave of avant-garde museums and private collections. In Strzemiński’s words, their public collection of international avant-garde art—now presented in a comprehensive rehang by new director Daniel Muzyczuk and including works by Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Theo van Doesburg, as well as Polish modernists like Karol Hiller and Tytus Czyżewski—sought to “put up a fight for modern art in Poland.”1

After the war, then-director Marian Minich structured the collection into a series of rooms evolving through the successive stylistic way stations of modern art (including reproductions of other pieces). This parcours culminated in an extraordinary, purpose-built “neo-plastic” room—an all-over painted exhibition space in which the geometric language of Van Doesburg leaves the canvas and spreads itself across the walls.2 Yet despite this influential history, Łódź’s position remains somewhat peripheral. Once the third, now the fourth-largest city in Poland, it has the highest unemployment rates in the country and has experienced one of the roughest economic rides since the transition period of the 1990s. This center-periphery relationship poses an interesting question: How to tell the story (or stories) of contemporary art in 2026 from an oblique vantage point?

The approach Muzyczuk and his colleagues have adopted in their re-hang—entitled “Ways of Seeing” in a nod to both John Berger and Strzemiński’s 1958 book Theory of Seeing—is what one might term “curatorial ostranenie,” the process of de-familiarization that Viktor Shklovsky took to be integral to poetic language.3 The collection is structured into thirteen transnational and transhistorical chapters (each presented as a modality of vision), which freely inter-combine chronologies and mediums. An associative journey through the historic collection—bolstered by over ninety new acquisitions from contemporary artists including R. H. Quaytman, Sharon Lockhart, and Liam Gillick—the rehang deftly defamiliarizes topics and artists we thought we knew. Within each chapter are also intervallic chapel-like spaces, reminiscent of the “time capsules” from Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition, that zoom in on significant years from the museum’s history.

Things get estranged from the outset. Set across three floors, visitors enter via a staircase accompanied by the sound of Józef Robakowski enumerating his own steps in a work titled I Am Going (1973). The re-hang’s first chapter, “It All Depends on the Point of View,” introduces the curatorial logic. Works shown here include Franciszka Themerson’s subtle painting (after which this chapter is named) of chimeric figures magnetized into a parody of one-point perspective (ca. 1974) and a Nancy Holt Locator (1970–81). Both shimmer in a pool of iridescent reflections cast by Joanna Rajkowska’s mirrored work on the back wall. This was a preparatory piece made for her Rose Passage in Łódź—a mirrored cul-de-sac, opened in 2014, that reflects the disintegration of her daughter’s vision following her eye cancer diagnosis.

One of the most striking chapters is titled “Afterimage,” bringing together works shaped by the cross-currents of memory and counter-memory. The supple, flaky archipelago of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s pink wax sculpture Ceroplastic Exercises (2018) expresses the fraught, hesitant process of remembering what others wish to forget. Its mutilated forms emerge from a wooden monument that Mirga-Tas produced near Borzęcin Dolny, in 2011, to commemorate the murder of Romani people during World War II, which was vandalized five years later. Nearby, a photograph from Zbigniew Libera’s “Positives” series (2002–03), Nepal, mimics the composition of Nick Ut’s famous 1972 Vietnam War photo of the “Napalm Girl” to produce a discomfortingly bucolic scene of parachutists laughing on an abandoned airfield.

Several inspired juxtapositions draw out the critical dimensions of curatorial ostranenie. In the chapter considering the male gaze and its refusal, “Gaze is a Bridge,” Strzemiński’s somewhat pacifying portrait of his student Hanna Orzechowska (Afterimage of Light: Redhead, 1949) reduces her to generic red lips and a shock of red hair. It hangs next to her own keenly observed self-portrait from the same year, pen in hand. Meanwhile in “Spatial Composition,” a section considering functionalism and the “rationalization” of space, Katarzyna Kobro’s famed abstract steel sculptures of the same title are presented on plinths alongside Lukasz Skapski’s “The Clinch: New Architecture of European Borders,” his 2016 series of all-white dioramas reconstructing the proliferating makeshift border constructions of Fortress Europe.

On the third floor, in a chapter on representation titled “Demonstration of Paintings,” are two adjoining works of the same title, from 1933 and 1948, by Marek Włodarski (Henryk Streng).4 In the earlier of these, three workers stand in an architectonic progression holding aloft paintings (like protestors, or auctioneers) of a dead soldier and a partially obscured scene of colonial exoticism. In the latter “demonstration of painting” Włodarski returned to the same composition in an abstract vernacular, with the figures absent and the paintings held aloft in a geometric configuration displaying different modes of abstraction.

Through these critical parallelisms and chronological time-loops, “Ways of Seeing” finds novel ways to jolt us out of habitualized patterns of perception. Sometimes the shocks are instant, as in the IRWIN collective’s Corpse of Art (2003–04), with its lifelike waxwork of Malevich’s open coffin. At other times they sneak up on you, as when I stood in front of Sharon Lockhart’s seemingly monochromatic cyanotype Untitled (Night Sky) (2022) for minutes before my eyes adjusted to the dark and the nocturnal clouds began to appear.