+ – 1968

+- 1968

9 June-16 September 2018

Format B1 Gallery

Curator of the exhibition: Poster Museum Team

The "+- 1968" exhibition is a presentation of Polish and foreign posters from the collection held by the Poster Museum in Wilanów. The title’s date is also that when operations were commenced by this, the first such institution in the world, whose mission has been to maintain archives and document modern-day iconographic imagery. The selection of posters representative of this period shows, on several levels of interpretation, the most characteristic styles and tendencies of the mid-1960s. The works selected, limited to 170 thematic posters, illustrate the most important events of that turbulent time, associated with, among other things:

• pacifist anti-war movements, the Cold War, the conflict in Vietnam, and the Cuban Revolution,
• avant-garde movements in the visual arts and new developments in the cinema, theatre and music, being forms of expression of new revolutionary socio-political movements, shaping the climate of alternative culture and the expansion of mass culture,
• the emergence of new aesthetics in visual arts, connected with the perception of pop-art and its manifestations in various areas of life.

The exhibition aims to prove that the establishment of the Poster Museum in Wilanów fifty years ago took place under the most favourable circumstances. Perhaps it was even coordinated with those processes and an additional stimulation for certain developments. Indeed, there was much that connected this special moment in the development of such a specific genre of art as the poster, with the unique role and rank that the Polish school of poster art had by then gained in the international arena.

The 1960s were when the poster de facto ceased to be treated as an intermediate genre between "great art" and applied arts. In it we find a variety of forms of unprecedented intensity: from pop-art to neo-art nouveau and psychedelia, clashing with the rational influences of the international typographic style and the individualism of the distinct Polish school of poster art. Graphic design was both initiating and reflecting the changing fashions and trends of contemporary pop culture.

The building housing the Poster Museum also became a precedent in the history of Warsaw architecture, being the first architectural complex built in the era of the People's Republic of Poland to be specifically intended as a museum, and taking into account its essential functions. Designed by the architects Barbara Kossuth and Jacek K. Cydzik, in collaboration with the constructor Adam Pulikowski, it became one of the icons of Polish modernism.

As a whole, this considered design, calculated to give the effect of consonance, becomes an attempt to reconstruct a time that left its special mark on history, integrating similar forms of artistic expression according to the intentions shaping the style of the second half of the twentieth century.

Poster exhibition design: Paweł Ryżko