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Culture
Portraits
Wojciech Bąkowski (above)
Agata ‘Endo’ Nowicka (above)
Joanna Mytkowska (top)
‘When I began my studies, I wanted to depict the poetry of the Poznań housing blocks, and particularly how my inner life is located between them’, says Wojciech Bąkowski, an artist who was moulded by Leszek Knaflewski’s Audiosfery studio. As a student, he played in the experimental groups Kot and Czikita. With friends from art school he founded the artistic group Penerstwo, focussed on recording internal emotional states and the seeming triviality of the everyday. He is also the creator of incredibly original ‘Spoken Films’ and has won many of Poland’s top artistic prizes. Bąkowski’s verse may be heard at solo concerts or on recordings by the now-defunct group Niwea •
In the 1990 s Endo made her first drawings using Microsoft’s Paint program, but now her works are among the most recognizable in print media, featured in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. In 2013, she organized an exhibition of Polish illustration art with Maria Zaleska at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw entitled Painters of Illustrations. She currently works with the Wall Street Journal Magazine •
When she took the helm of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2006, she had completed years of practice as a curator and organizer at Galeria Foksal, the Galeria Foksal Foundation, and the Polonia pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale. Then she took on the future of Poland’s largest modern art institution. Mytkowska is one of many women currently leading the most important art institutions in the country (in Warsaw alone, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art is headed by Hanna Wróblewska, the National Museum by Agnieszka Morawińska, and the Centre for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle by Małgorzata Ludwisiak) •