Gallery As An Artistic Concept In Conceptual Art

The text announces a research program on the galleries that emerged in relation to conceptual art and introduces the scope and method of research. The general aim of the research is to set apart the issue of a conceptual gallery as an independent artistic phenomenon. A conceptual gallery is examined as a general artistic formula. The methodological scheme presented in the text aims at establishing a basic chronology and creating a typology of the trend. Historically, conceptual galleries emerged and were shaped in the frame of a broadly understood conceptual tendency (a leading tendency in the seventies) because at that time, there occurred a specific formal-artistic relationship between art and gallery. Until now, the conceptual gallery trend has been examined mainly in the context of the social, political and cultural conditions in which they were functioning. The research on conceptual galleries as an artistic project and a form of conceptual art causes the vector of the research to reverse. The artistic character of particular galleries could be graded into those which housed more or less radical projects. One may imagine a scale between limit points: a gallery as a work of art and a gallery as an art container and place all galleries from the seventies on it. The beginning of the conceptual gallery movement in Poland is marked by a project by Andrzej Kostolowski and Jaroslaw Kozlowski entitled NET (1971), based on a mail-art formula. It assumed not only collecting and exhibiting the works sent (which was each institution’s aim), but also creating their own specific points in the network of institutions. Thirty five galleries participated in an exhibition which summarised an activity of the BWA Gallery in Sopot in the summer of 1981. The galleries of this type functioned in the next decade, even during martial law. In the mid-nineties the gallery movement started to integrate again, however after 2000 the commercialisation of the art market caused their disappearance