Currently in the area of culture the concept of pro publico opens the door to the most opinion-forming institutions, triggering mechanisms and resources „blocked” once by the inconvenient criteria of quality. Promotion of the intention itself has become more important than its realization, and nowadays the adjective public, unlike houses and toilets, ennobles today places and events. Author’s personality, his talent as well as his name make it difficult for this kind of political art to become public as it systematically shifts the center of gravity to the initiators of organized events. Passion of life, anguish, ecstasy, artwork, and even creative activity have been effectively removed from the contemporary language of art, which describes merely artistic facts and cultural projects. The exhibition „Art in private space” is polemic on the seasonal nature of art. It shifts the burden of the reception to the intimate relation between the author and his work, bringing attention to what has already been, is and will be a separate mystery in art–to its universality. Author creates not only for himself, for his receivers, for his paymasters, for faith or idea, but he creates for diverse reasons, and such diversity is his most powerful force. That’s why Stanisław Bryndal, Józef Gielniak, Aleksandra Gieraga, Barbara Jonscher, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Antoni Kenar, Jerzy Nowosielski, Jerzy Panek, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Jonasz Stern, Anna Wajda can enter into a fascinating dialogue with each other in the Nowy Sącz gallery. To create a new value of a common meeting, beside a number of different values, to meet the art unlimited by current economic situation, sociological pretext or curator’s order. The selection of eleven artistic mindsets presented at the exhibition, frequently despite a few generation gaps, combines not only the final quality of realization but mostly the intimacy of the expression, each time closely linked with the individual biography. It is thus the art of interior freedom, created on one’s own „request”, clear, and entirely determined by its own author. Taking a receiver seriously starts as early as in the artist’s workshop. I heard the question used in the title uttered by a director of some artistic center. His decisive mode and approval for cultural fashion hidden in it had a disarming sincerity. Artistic activity unrelated to mass culture has always been and will be an intimate value, dramaturgy which takes place mainly between the artist and his work. Its dramatically personal dimension does not suit to the notion of artwork in public space, and its own presence irritates many contemporary, cultural decision-makers. At the exhibition in BWA Sokół Gallery of Contemporary Art, branch of Sokół Małopolska Culture Centre in Nowy Sącz we are presenting thus not so modern art of private spaces.

Jerzy Fober