The name and look of Łódzka Galeria Sztuki are no accident. We draw on one of the most important traditions of the Polish and European avant-garde — one that developed right here in Łódź.
In the 1920s and 30s Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro created unism here — the idea of a painting or sculpture as a coherent, self-contained whole, with no hierarchy and no illusion. Strzemiński also wrote about "afterimages" (powidoki): the images that linger under your eyelids after looking at intense light or colour. That notion — the memory of a sensation — gives our visual identity its name.
Together with the "a.r." group, the avant-garde did something more: they built a collection of modern art and gave it to the city. It seeded the holdings of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź — one of the oldest public collections of modern art in the world. To this day you can see its Neoplastic Room there — a space conceived as a whole: colour, plane and architecture together.
Hence our language: primary colours, black lines, rectangular planes, no ornament. We don't copy avant-garde works — we borrow their way of thinking: order, clarity, form reduced to the essential.
We believe this tradition serves contemporary art well. We want the artists' work to draw your attention, not the interface. A gallery should be like a good frame — present, but in the background. This is our nod to Łódź and to an avant-garde that is still alive here.