Welcome to A Difficult Age in MO Museum‘s main hall!

The protagonists of this exhibition are three of Poland’s most famous postwar artists: sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, film director Andrzej Wajda, and painter Andrzej Wróblewski. Although their works are well known in Poland and throughout the world, they are constantly being discovered anew, and viewed in new ways, by researchers. The point of reference for this exhibition is the adolescent years of these artists, when all three were engulfed by the Second World War.

Szapocznikow, Wajda, and Wróblewski also have other things in common, including friendship and very similar dates of birth. What‘s more, they all experienced the very early loss of a father and all three were witnesses to the horrors of war around them. Psychologists believe that adolescence determines the future course of an individual’s life, thus this tragic period in history caused the traumatic experiences that each of these artists later revealed in their work.

The exhibition A Difficult Age seeks to find the points of connection between works by artists obsessed by war and death. The exhibition displayed here at MO Museum is a version of an earlier collection shown at the Silesian Museum in Katowice, Poland, in 2018, and the title has been borrowed from the name of Alina Szapocznikow‘s sculpture Difficult Age.