Archives of the Wrocław Avant-Garde

Archives of the Wrocław Avant-Garde. Processing, Preservation, Public Access, and Educational Program

In 2025, the Arton Foundation is carrying out the project Archives of the Wrocław Avant-Garde. Processing, Conservation, Access and Educational Program, which will allow us to process the private archive of Barbara Kozłowska and Zbigniew Makarewicz – a unique collection of artistic documentation consistently built over nearly five decades. As part of the project, we are conducting an inventory, preparing metadata and descriptions, performing preventive conservation, and carrying out digitization. The results of our work will be made available in the publicly accessible Forgotten Heritage database, and digital copies will also be secured in the repository of the National Digital Archives.

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state special purpose fund.

Filmed tour of Barbara Kozłowska’s studio, featuring insights from Zbigniew Makarewicz and Marika Kuźmicz (in Polish) ╰┈➤

Barbara Kozłowska (1940–2008) – conceptual artist, performer, painter, sculptor, poet, and set designer. A graduate of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, she earned her diploma in 1965 with a work titled Architectural Painting for the Design of the Pantomime Theatre Building in ceramic technique. She took part in some of the most groundbreaking art events of the 1970s, such as Wrocław '70 Symposium and the Meeting of Dreamers in Elbląg (1971). Between 1972 and 1982, she transformed her studio in Wrocław into her own independent gallery – Babel – a space for meetings and exchange among artists. Kozłowska’s art often revolved around ephemeral, barely perceptible, and selfless gestures. Her works usually took the form of performances and fleeting spatial interventions. Since 1970, she pursued the long-term project Boundary Line, traveling to Siberia, the United Kingdom, Malta, Italy, France, the Netherlands, former Yugoslavia, Germany, and the USA.

Zbigniew Makarewicz (b. 1940) – sculptor, performer, and creator of installations and actions on the borderline of visual art and theatre. A graduate of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, he received his diploma in sculpture in 1965 in the studio of Xawery Dunikowski. He participated in independent artistic initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, including pioneering performance and installation works such as Composition of Emotional Space (1968). From 1978 to 1981 and again from 1989 to 1994, he ran the independent Gallery “X” in Wrocław – a space for documenting and exhibiting contemporary art. His artistic practice merges sculpture, installation, happening, and text, resulting in works of processual and multilayered character. Central to his practice is the notion of “archaeology” – understood as the retrieval of memory through objects. Since the 1960s, he has consistently developed a body of work based on critique of official narratives and an ironic deconstruction of cultural language.