Polish Print – Art and Education - MTG Krakow 2009

This exhibition: "GRAFIKA POLSKA - SZTUKA I EDUKACJA" , "POLISH PRINTMAKING - ART & EDUCATION" is a memory picture that I have made of the community of polish professors and other tutors at the turn of the centuries in the face of the challenges of digitalization that are waiting for them...

As opposed to the popular means of visual expression, printmaking is constituted by a sophisticated world of forms and content. Owning the techniques and technologies derived from the classical canon of image copying, printmaking brings to art its own contribution in the shape of prints on paper or other carries. Quite often there are fully spatial objects of works contained in digital recording, too. In a board perspective - printmaking is a collection of accurately defined procedures, whose implementation helps preserving its ethical coherence and esthetic autonomy. Students receive instruction from professors, enjoy respect rooted in their art and their teaching experience. The attractiveness of graphics comes from constant enrichment and upgrading of the description of the workshop procedures. The importance of polish printmaking is determined by the quality of the art verified by numerous biennial and triennial as well as other kinds of reviews in Poland and abroad. The phenomenon of the discipline's vitality is connected with the fact of permanent extending the scope of activities by vital dilemas of the modern world. In printmaking, as in every field, in which the ultimate result of an artistic venture is determined not only by concept byt also broad workshop competences, the coexistence of experience and unlimited readiness to experiment seems to be justified. However, mistaken will be anyone who came to the conclusion that the academies' faculty members are merely a corps of useful instructors sharing their professional groove with students.

The transparency of the workshop beinig a basis of the didactic process is not more then an indisposable complement of a complex process of common search of the work's shape. In our institutional model of printmaking there is no publishing house intended to become a place, where a product called aristic print can be manufactured. The infrastructure of printmaking in Poland after the second world war was located exclusively in the revived and newlyfounded art academies.