A municipal contemporary art gallery from 1949, with 800 m2 of exhibition space, a collection, the Polish Poster Biennale and its own publishing house.
The BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice has operated since 1949 and is housed in an exhibition pavilion at Wojciecha Korfantego 6. It shows contemporary art by Polish and foreign artists, and also runs its own collection, education and publishing.
The gallery was established in August 1949 as a branch of the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions. Since 1994 it has been a municipal gallery, and its day-to-day activity is financed from the budget of Katowice.
Exhibitors here have included Jerzy Nowosielski (1989), Leon Tarasewicz (1995), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1998), Jerzy Lewczyński (2006) and Filip Dujardin (2018). It neighbours the Stanisław Wyspiański Silesian Theatre, which is a few hundred metres away.
The exhibition space is 800 m2, and the programme includes solo and group exhibitions. The gallery's website shows current exhibitions, openings, events and workshops, so the scope of the programme changes from month to month.
Since 1972 the gallery has organised the recurring Polish Poster Biennale. Until 2012 it prepared the Polish Graphic Arts Triennial, an exhibition accompanying the International Print Triennial in Kraków, and then the organisation was taken over by the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice.
The purchase of works and the building of a collection began in 1970. The collection numbers over a thousand works: mainly painting, prints and drawing, and fewer sculptures, collages and artistic textiles. The collection includes works by, among others, Edward Dwurnik, Józef Szajna, Zbigniew Libera and Henryk Waniek.
The gallery's website also describes the reactivation of the BWA contemporary art collection after a break of almost three decades.
The gallery has a bookshop with its own publications and those of other institutions, posters and postcards. The gallery's catalogues have won awards in book competitions, for example Śląska Rzecz 2018 in the category of applied graphics for the book "Wymiennik". Since 2012 the educational project "Do sztuki gotowi start" ("Ready, Steady, Art") has been under way, in which over fifty artists from various fields have taken part.
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