The curator as detective. Based on the preparations for the Group of Five exhibition

The curator ceases to be merely an interpreter and organiser, and becomes a researcher-detective who navigates incomplete archives, scattered collections and fragmentary testimonies of the era. Preparing the exhibition then becomes an investigative process, in which every piece of information uncovered serves as circumstantial evidence, and every work as potential proof.

The specific nature of the work on the Group of Five exhibition stems primarily from the ephemeral nature of the group itself and the lack of an established canon of its work. The short duration of its activity, the limited number of exhibitions and its tenuous place in later historiography mean that the curator does not have a stable list of ‘certain works’. Instead, they must contend with gaps: missing paintings, ambiguous titles, conflicting attributions. Every attribution of a painting to a specific title by the artist or to a specific exhibition requires reconstruction based on comparisons with recovered illustrative materials and an analysis of written sources.

Host:

Exhibition curator Irena Buchenfeld – an art historian, works in the Department of Modern Painting at the National Museum in Kraków; curator of an exhibition dedicated to the Group of Five (National Museum – MNK Main Building, February–July 2026). Her interests focus on issues related to 19th- and 20th-century painting and applied art in the broadest sense. She is the author of publications on the subject of sacred art, particularly wall paintings, as well as the activities of the ‘Polish Applied Art’ Society.