ING Polish Art Foundation

We promote Polish contemporary art

The ING Polish Art Foundation promotes Polish contemporary art by building art collections and delivering artistic projects. In 2015, there were 4 new works added to the collection, namely the works of Katarzyna Przezwańska, Oskar Dawicki and Łukasz Jastrubczak.

See the animation movie showing the Foundation activities. It was made by Rafał Dominik and Tymek Borowski – an artist whose works are included in the Foundation’s collection and laureate of Polityka’s Passport (Paszport Polityki).

In 2015, the ING Polish Art Foundation – one of the first corporate collections in Poland – celebrated its 15th anniversary. To mark the anniversary, the Foundation staged an exhibition Art in Our Age (Sztuka w naszym wieku) in cooperation with Zachęta – the National Gallery of Art showing the works from ING Polish Art Foundation and Zachęta’s collections. The Foundation commissioned Rafał Dominik and Szymon Żydek, a duet consisting of an artist and a curator, to create an exhibition in Zachęta which would introduce and explain the complexity of perception and usage of the contemporary art in daily life.

A book entitled Art in Our Age was also published to commemorate that jubilee. It is a story on the contemporary art consisting of mini-essays, richly and surprisingly illustrated with reproductions of works of contemporary Polish artists taken from the collections of the two institutions. Professionals make use of funny or serious, often provocative texts to give answers to basic questions about the contemporary art. The texts were written by: Hanna Wróblewska, director of Zachęta; Sebastian Cichocki, deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art; Dorota Jarecka, journalist; Oskar Dawicki, artist; Łukasz Gorczyca, gallerist and writer; Maria Poprzęcka, art historian, and many other individuals renowned in the world of art.

The contemporary art is a crucial element of culture, and cultural competencies are vital in building civil society. Yet, the familiarity of and interest in the contemporary art among Poles are very small. It is viewed as an exclusive welfare which requires specialist knowledge. That is why, last year, the ING Polish Art Foundation started a number of educational activities addressed to our employees. Every week, we organise a 15-20-minute meeting for interested employees in which they can learn about given works of arts from the collection and their authors’ output, the trends they represent and historical references in the background. 

Learn more about the ING Polish Art Foundation at the Foundation website