Gallery of non-professional art

The aim of the exhibition was to show the specific nature of non-professional art in Upper Silesia. This art, like no other, is linked to the artist's life and direct experiences, describing their surroundings, work, relationships with loved ones, drawing on legends and memories. It is therefore not surprising that Silesian artists addressed themes specific to their region.

To make the message more vivid, the exhibition's structure was based on the metaphor of the mine as a combination of the three most important symbolic areas for Silesian tradition. The mine shaft with the winding tower connects the underground zone, associated with work, the surface, where social life takes place, and the sky, representing spirituality. These spheres reflect the traditional Silesian axiological triad, which consists of God, work and family. The first part of the exhibition presents everything that directly or indirectly relates to work and mining: the architecture of mines, mining corridors and the effort of miners during their shift. The cult of Saint Barbara, patroness of miners, whose images often decorated underground adits, is also associated with hard work underground. In Bronisław Krawczuk's painting "The Treasurer carves Saint Barbara", the saint, like the Virgin Mary in "Pietà", holds a dead miner in a formal uniform on her lap. Her body, resembling a slag heap built from the silhouettes of nameless miners, is a rock in which the Treasurer – guardian of underground riches – carves a monument dedicated to all mining uprisings. In the second part, one can observe what happens on the surface: home, family, the backyard garden and other aspects of social life in mining settlements. The narrative of the paintings displayed here stems from a great attachment to what is familiar, domesticated. The artists try to depict everything as beautifully as possible, so they use a full range of colors, rationalize, and even idealize what they see, or what they have recorded in their memory. Examples include paintings by Paweł Wróbel, including a small composition showing allotment gardens, which are greatly cherished in Silesia.

The last sequence of the exhibition refers to the winding tower, which crowns the silhouette of the mine, sharply piercing the sky, a symbol of infinity. It therefore includes works related to the pursuit of transcendence and going beyond oneself. From spiritual values comes the desire to discover truth and experience beauty. Alongside expressions of traditionally understood religiosity, we find here traces of the search for values extending beyond the limits of human cognition. The desire for transgression liberates the imagination, opens the mind and fantasy to culturally alien or imagined worlds based on fragments of information – inspirations can be diverse: from legends and tales to the study of theosophical writings or runes, from a found fossil fragment to photographs in a colorful magazine. Complementing the main narrative line of the exhibition, which discusses the phenomenon of non-professional art in Silesia, is an exhibition of works by members of the Gwarek 58 group, represented by miners associated with the former Katowice mine. This special distinction is related to the context of the place – it is a symbolic return of the artists to the grounds of the plant where they worked for many years. In the exhibition, in addition to graphics characteristic of Gwarek, the specific Silesian coal sculpture could not be missing.

Among the many cliché products mass-produced in the 1960s and 1970s, the works of Franciszek Kurzej stand out, as he was one of the few who created full sculptures and emphasized their expressive, porous anthracite structure. As part of the permanent exhibition, we have also allocated space for individual exhibitions of the most outstanding representatives of one of the most interesting phenomena within non-professional art, which is outsider art. In 2015, we showed individual exhibitions of Jan Nowak and Władysław Grygny. Here we also present the most interesting representatives of Polish art brut. The cycle was initiated by exhibitions of paintings by Maria Wnęk and sculptures by Stanisław Zagajewski.

Exhibition curator: Sonia Wilk

We encourage you to see "Art up close", a series of presentations of works from the collection of the Silesian Museum, in which we show our rich and diverse collections, accompanied by a curatorial commentary.