[EN] In 1983, American artists donated a collection of their works as part of a project entitled "Échange entre artistes 1931–1982, Pologne-USA", initiated by artists Henryk Stażewski (founding member of the a.r. group and the Foksal Gallery, both initiatives devoted to the promotion of the avant-garde) and Sam Francis (member of the Artists Committee supporting and advising the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), as well as Anka Ptaszkowska (critic, co-founder of Foksal Gallery) and Pontus Hultén (director of MOCA). The idea behind the project was to establish a dialogue between Polish and American artists: works by Polish artists were given to the MOCA collection “in exchange” for works by American artists donated to the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
The nearly forty works by American artists reflect a range of tendencies in American art of the turn of the 1970s and 80s: post-minimalism, performance, and conceptual art. Many of these works are difficult to classify and fly in the face of prevailing interpretations of American art of the era; they exemplify west-coast approaches to artmaking, contrasting with the languages established by artists centered around New York. The "Échange" project and the resulting collection invite interpretations of the complex political circumstances of the time: the politics of the Iron Curtain and Martial Law in Poland.
