Lost | Recovered

Exhibition design 2022 | “Lost / Recovered: Wroclaw collections” in the Kordegarda gallery in Warsaw | Team: Jan Strumiłło, Zofia Zatorska | Production: Aleksander Sieklicki | Exhibition is open 6.07 – 31.07.2022 | Photos courtesy of NCK | Photography by Wojciech Dobrogojski

The tight space of Kordegarda gallery required a simple and powerful exhibition concept. Our design conveys in the abstract form the dramatic histories of art pieces lost during world war II and their ongoing recovery by the Polish state. To the eleven presented pieces, including works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Jacob Jordaens, we added tens upon tens of white “ghosts” – figures of the many works still missing since 1945. The forms of artwork tags and curatorial texts, loosely leaning against gallery walls, further strengthen the idea. They give the exhibition an air of a warehouse, where looted art is anonymously heaped and stacked, in what becomes almost the antithesis of an exhibition. The minister of culture and national heritage prof. Piotr Gliński personally inaugurated the exhibition.