20th Biennial of Polish Poster, Katowice 2007
20th Biennial of Polish Poster — catalogue / summary The catalogue of the 20th Biennial of Polish Poster features reproductions of the posters which received awards, and shortlisted works which were selected...
‘Wanting to assess the state-of-the-art of contemporary Polish poster art, I should ask firstly about its raison d’être. I try to define its place within the range of contemporary plastic arts that do shape the civilization of the image in an objective manner. How can we establish the artistic status of today’s poster, when its life is often compared to the life of a retired person and when its heroic past arouses only nostalgic memories? Leaving sentiments aside, I should settle in the end the usefulness of its functions and its pragmatics, assuming that it has still the same aims as in its high time, when it had been triumphant and modelling our imagination. Irrespective of the answer to these questions, I watch it carefully. This is so, because our first reaction to the presence of a poster in our sight should always be such, since its purpose consists in provoking our sight. Formal values are always distinctive features. The developing standardisation of methods of imaging, the unification and cosmopolitan tendencies within the area of techniques and skills became today an intrinsic feature of the global village, where there is no place for local dialects. The poster has got as high level of communication as the old ambitions and aspirations of the originators of the Esperanto language – it has a clear structure and is commonly understood and easily modifiable, depending on needs and situations. Polish poster art has lost its stylistic separateness, however this cannot be a charge. We should get use to this, since no reactivation is either possible or justified yet.
It’s difficult to imagine some isolated milieus that could cultivate a separate tradition or creatively continue the tendencies commenced by some vernacular masters or regional schools. These chapters of the poster history are already closed.’
Mariusz Knorowski — fragment of the text from the catalogue
