The Gallery of Polish Painting after the year 1945 is the first permanent display of  contemporary painting in the post-war history of the Silesian Museum in Katowice. The works hereby presented constitute a small part of the vast museum collection gathered in Poland after  World War II, comprising 585 items of artists representing different generations and artistic  backgrounds. Its history goes back to the restitution of the museum in 1984. The acquisition of art created in earlier years was a daunting task - thus, its collection is modestly represented. The later years, especially the 1980s and also the 90s have much wider representation. The socio-political changes that came after the year 1989, economic transformation and the ensuing financial restrictions applied to cultural centres caused a serious slowdown in expanding the collection over many years to come.
The idea behind the display was to continue and complete the existing Gallery of Polish Painting 1800-1945 (its core collection started in the 1930s) with the aim to document and highlight the most significant phenomena in the history of art after 1945. It encompasses matter painting, geometric abstraction and emotional painting (Informel), Tashisme, metaphor painting, Neo-expressionism and Neo-figuration. Among them there are works created by well-known authors as well as by those less recognised but definitely worthy of public attention and interest. It is by no means certain that the collection includes works of the most prominent artists  who had the greatest impact on the shape and development of art at that time ( among others Andrzej Wróblewski, Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Nowosielski, Władysław Hasior, Edward Dwurnik, Jerzy Duda-Gracz).
The choices of works depended also on  practical conditions like  exhibition space available in the Museum and the character of the existing collection.  The display, though enclosed in the symbolic time brackets, is not strictly chronological and its main intention is to exemplify certain styles and trends in post-war art, which did not necessarily followed one after another  respectively to the changing times and aesthetic  values over  the years.
The  exhibition comes also as a harbinger of the future more extensive Gallery of the Polish Painting after 1945, which will soon find its new seat within the stately exhibition walls of the new building of the Silesian Museum in Katowice.

Curator of exhibition: Joanna Szeligowska-Farquhar