As I mentioned yesterday, I was looking to visit some Art Galleries while in Krakow. However, there are many ‘Museums’ in the city and it wasn’t clear which would have what I was looking for. So I popped into the Tourist Information Centre, where a young lady swiftly put 5 crosses on one of her free maps. (The map was upside down so I was very impressed with her knowledge of the city – especially when I subsequently discovered that each one was precisely marked!)
My plan was to visit 2, maybe 3, so I set off for the furthest away, which was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (or MOCAK for short). There I discovered a particular exhibition of sculptures by Krzysztof M. Bednarski entitled Karl Marx vs Moby Dick. (Now there’s a match you don’t see every day). I’ve shown only a few of his items below, but what that man cannot do with heads of Marx and metal shapes representing a whale is not worth knowing about.
Note that I’ve split this post into the different galleries that I visited, so don’t forget to page further down… 🙂
Next up was the National Museum. Here there were a number of different themes, including some Henry Moore sculptures, various arts and crafts and an extensive collection of works by the prolific Stanislaw Wyspianski.
I still had some time to spare so I wandered along to the Jozef Czapski Pavilion. Here I was a little disappointed. There are one or two paintings on display, but the building is a sort of annexe to the Emeryk Hutten-Czapski Museum. It houses an important collection of Polish coins and medals, which is OK if you like that sort of thing…
Just around the corner was, perhaps my favourite of them all, the EUROPEUM or Centre for European Culture. This was to be the last I visited. (The 5th is above the Cloth Market or Sukiennice in the Main Square in case you ever decide to visit). And, I think it’s perhaps fitting, given the reason I went to Krakow, that the last image is of the inside of a Tavern! 🍻 Cheers!
Alittlebitoutoffocus 
How fun!
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It was very interesting. I’m always amazed at the skill of the artists and the ingenuity of the sculptors. There were several other ‘pieces’ that I didn’t show, like a rolled up carpet with flashing lights inside (hard to convey that in a photo), a video of a dog eating what looked like hotdogs, or more likely frankfurters, sticking out of Marx’s head) and a model of an actor in front of one of those light-bulbed theatrical mirrors removing a dog’s head, with a sheep’s head on the table, entitled “Cut!”. But I thought that was a bit too weird and gruesome to post.
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Yup. I love soaking in the creativity. I love museums. What I also get struck with when viewing your photo tours is how much history Europeans are surrounded by on a daily basis. That’s not a new or original observation, but it is what I think about looking at your photos. I have spent months in Europe, and it was everywhere. The baroque church down the street, the 14th C ruins over in the field, the…
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You’re absolutely right. We’re very fortunate to have such a wealth, and very diverse in many respects, history in a relatively small area. ‘Central’ Europe is quite similar in many ways, but I’ll be visiting Finland for the first time later in the year (still only 2 to 3 hours flight away from here) and I anticipate a completely different landscape. Can’t wait… 🙂
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