“The 3×YES exhibition, a show of the collection of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009, was a kind of manifesto for a political, civic, and critical museum. As part of 3×YES we presented a series of Rafał Bujnowski’s drawings entitled Miners, which interested us for its connection to the miners’ strikes that took place throughout Poland in 2007. We displayed Miners with some pictures by Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu from 1972, entitled Commuters, which, much like Bujnowski’s pieces, depict portraits of workers in a time of state crisis. The exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Joanna Mytkowska, museum director Art collection 2009 was focused on the subject of the excluded people of today, it inquired into what conflicts had replaced the class struggle and how art positioned itself within them. But Miners is, of course, much more than its subject matter. The series of drawings was made with charcoal, the object of the miners’ labors. Thus the artist put forward his trademark “blend” of the subject of the art and its object. At the same time, he makes the focal point the concept of work: the work of the miner and the work of the painter.”
Joanna Mytkowska, museum director
