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Poland to Stage Summer-Long Gay Themed Exhibition at National Museum

■ Paweł Leszkowicz, the Polish art acedemic who has put together the Ars Homo Erotica exhibition which opens at the National Musuem in Warsaw in June.

WARSAW, March 14, 2010  –  Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw is to stage an “Ars Homo Erotica” exhibition this summer.  It will present over 200 artworks from antiquity to the twenty-first century, with Greek vases with frolicking youths, male nudes by the “old masters and mistresses” of sculpture and painting to contemporary Central-Eastern European LGBT art commissioned especially for the exhibition.

Although lesbian and gay art has belonged to the canon of ‘museology’ since 1970s, there has not been yet such a comprehensive exhibition of homoeroticism in any world museum.  It is also the first show of the queer art of Central and Eastern Europe.

The exhibition opens on June 10 and will run until September 5, giving visitors to Warsaw for July’s staging of EuroPride an added attraction.

A pioneering, multimedia exhibition Ars Homo Erotica will offer  a radically different approach to the history of art, rethinking and “queering” the canons of representation.

Among the contemporary artists who have been commissioned are David Cerny of the Czech Republic, Anna Daucikova of Slovakia,  and S and P Stanikas of Lithuania.

The exhibition has been put together by Paweł Leszkowicz, Ph.D, a noted Polish art curator and lecturer/writer.  He assembled the exhibition of contemporary queer art Love and Democracy in 2005,  and wrote, with his partner Tomek Kitlinski, the book Love and Democracy. Reflections on the Homosexual Question in Poland.

In an introduction to the exhibition, Paweł Leszkowicz writes: “Since the fall of Communism (and with a number of art-historical antecedents!), the trend of gay and lesbian art has developed here.  It functions in the very centre of social and political struggle for LGBTQ rights, freedom of expression and democracy.

“The aims of the exhibition are scholarly and educational: to examine the tendencies of queer art in the context of art history and of current politics and society.”

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