Is seeing a purely biological function, or is it also a cultural and political action? Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is opening a new permanent exhibition. Ways of Seeing. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź invites visitors to reflect on the extent of the levels of the experience of looking. The exhibition attempts to answer the question of how the eye perceives visual stimuli, as well as the ways viewers interpret images, and how memory, emotions, technology, and historical context influence the perception of art.
The title was inspired by Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing (1956) and John Berger’s series of films about art, Ways of Seeing (1972). While the first one emphasised that seeing is not a passive process – sight and intellect are in constant interaction, the latter pointed to the social and ideological conditions of seeing. Both of these themes come together in the exhibition as the curators emphasise that seeing is not a neutral act. It always depends on time, place, experience and knowledge. It is precisely this multiplicity of perspectives and overlapping interpretations that form the narrative axis of the exhibition.
Seeing as a starting point
Ways of Seeing. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is the latest instalment in a series of presentations of the unique collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Its origins date back to the 1920s and 1930s, when a group of artists known as a.r. – including Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and Henryk Stażewski – began a rather unprecedented initiative. The group’s collection included the art of their contemporaries, creating a unique archive of the living avant-garde.
The collection grew thanks to donations from international artists and is still being supplemented with works by subsequent generations, with works by representatives of such movements as Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. The collection assembled in this way still forms the foundation of the museum today, having developed a unique way of presenting its collection. Instead of chronology, it offers a thematic narrative in which the dialogue between the works transcends the boundaries of eras and styles.
The exhibition is divided into 13 chapters that explore various aspects of vision – from biological foundations and cultural and social contexts, to political and identity implications. Viewers move sequentially through themes where works of art serve as visual arguments in the debate about the meaning of images.
“Subsequent sequences take into account the social context and show that seeing can also be a gesture of opposition to dominant narratives, and that the gaze can become a tool of emancipation.”
The fundamental question – how and why do we see? – juxtaposes artistic experiments with scientific research on visual perception, showing how the development of optics and photography influenced 20th-century art. The study of the relationship between sight and memory examines how images are remembered and how visuality shapes memories – both personal and collective. Subsequent sequences take into account the social context and show that seeing can also be a gesture of opposition to dominant narratives, and that the gaze can become a tool of emancipation. In turn, issues of physicality and the senses are revealed in works where the experience of seeing is intertwined with physicality, gender and emotionality.
Artists and their works
Bringing together works by over 200 artists from Poland and around the world, the exhibition also includes works that are themselves studies of “ways of seeing”.
One of the creators of the collection and an outstanding sculptor offering a new perspective on this field of art was Katarzyna Kobro. Her Spatial Composition 3 (1928) is a sculpture in which form becomes a study of the intersection of space and movement. Kobro redefined the way of looking at a work of art: not as a closed object, but as an open structure, co-created by the environment and the viewer. Her works are an example of thinking about seeing as a participatory act. Kobro can also be seen as of how the public perceives an artist, from unequivocal criticism at the beginning of her career to gaining recognition and later being counted among the most outstanding artists of Polish and international art.
Another artist involved in creating the museum’s collection was Władysław Strzemiński. The exhibition will feature his Drawings for the Theory of Seeing (1947–1951), created as a supplement to the theoretical text and illustrate the issues raised in it. The Theory of Seeing is a record of lectures given by Strzemiński while he was working at the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts Łódź. The drawings refer to research on visual perception, in which the artist attempts to capture how the eye and mind interact in the act of seeing.
“Art does not reproduce what we see; it makes us see – can be applied to both the creator and the viewer looking at the work”, Paul Klee once said. His Stars Above Things (1913) combines elements of abstraction and symbolism. The stars, floating above earthly matter, can be interpreted as a suggestion that vision can open up access to spiritual reality. Klee is one of the classics of avant-garde art of the first half of the 20th century. Yet his works were not included in the collection created by the a.r. group, but were purchased for the museum’s collection at a later date. Similar to Władysław Strzemiński, Klee was a lecturer at an art college and wrote down his theoretical reflections on art while working at the Bauhaus. He was interested in the issues of vision and the perception of art by himself as an artist. As he wrote: “All these paths meet in the eye and there, transformed into form, lead to a synthesis of external vision and internal contemplation”.
Mykola Ridnyi refers directly to the process of vision in his Gradual Loss of Vision (2017). Using images and descriptions, the artist explores the experience of sight loss. What appears to be a documentation of a biological process turns out to be a metaphor for social and political blindness. Ridnyi asks what disappears from the field of vision of individuals and communities.
Sometimes, what we see can be almost impossible to recreate. Erna Rosenstein’s painting Screens (1951) features motifs of a fragmented field of vision and a fragmentary image. The artist seems to ask whether seeing can ever capture the trauma and experience of war. Zbigniew Libera’s Nepal (from the series Pozytywy, 2003) also refers to dramatic events, but here the horror is transformed into an idyll. His series consists of works that reinterpret well-known press photographs, in which dramatic scenes have been replaced with seemingly idyllic images. It is a game with the mechanisms of media perception – who constructs what we see and how? Libera points to the mechanisms that enable the manipulation of photographic messages and the fabrication of any information that bears the hallmarks of truth, which is also a very topical issue in the age of artificial intelligence.
Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982) is a recording of the artist cutting holes in the black mask covering her head. Using scissors, she cuts one hole after another, revealing her face piece by piece. Each cut is followed by a short sequence of archival footage from a television programme on the history of Yugoslavia, produced by the state shortly after the death of Marshal Tito in 1980. Iveković exposes her face and, at the same time, suggests the insidiousness of national propaganda. She reshuffles the official narrative, using cutting as a leitmotif and a reference to editing and montage strategies, prompting us to consider how much we can believe what the media shows us.
A woman’s point of view
Feminist artists often speak out critically against visual stereotypes. Barbara Hammer’s photograph Big Eye (1980) analyses the relationship between the gaze and the body, asking whether “female gaze” – a gaze free from objectification – is possible. Hammer points out that the act of looking is gendered and that female experience is often marginalised. The eye looks at us, the photographer seems to be reflected in the pupil, and she is the object of this gaze, regaining power over how she wants to be perceived. The woman gains control over her representation and, by dethroning the male viewer, reverses the patriarchal order – she is not an object to be viewed, but the creator of the image and an active observer.
Another photographer, Birgit Jorgenssen, staged a scene in which a bird’s nest with two small eggs was placed between her thighs. There is a certain contradiction between sexuality and motherhood in this. The “nest” becomes more than just a vague metaphor for female reproduction. The concept of gender, reproduction, and the family home is multiplied and ironically subverted.
The questions of femininity were also asked by Maria Pinińska-Bereś. In her installation Tent (1976), we can look inside a fabric structure that is soft and pleasant. It provides shelter and intimacy, but at the same time raises the question of whether femininity must be hidden and suppressed. In her works, the artist often referred to the theme of the objectification of women and the suppression of their expression. The structure serves to separate her own territory and shows the relationship between women and their surroundings – it is a shelter that can be closed. Maria Pinińska-Bereś repeatedly described her art as a “refuge”, a space where she can hide from the patriarchal world and dictate her own terms.
To see differently
Ways of Seeing. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź proves that looking at art and through art is still a subject of debate – from the avant-garde explorations of the early 20th century to contemporary artistic strategies that examine the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The exhibition is not only a presentation of works of art, but also an invitation to reflect on one’s own perspective. Who is looking, at whom and from what position? How are the mechanisms of visibility and invisibility constructed? How does technology change our eye?
The exhibition suggests treating the museum as a laboratory of vision and viewing as a critical and creative act. In a world saturated with images, it reminds us that each image can be interpreted in many ways, and that the very process of viewing is one of the most vital tools for understanding the world.
“The exhibition is not only a presentation of works of art, but also an invitation to reflect on one’s own perspective. Who is looking, at whom and from what position? How are the mechanisms of visibility and invisibility constructed? How does technology change our eye?”
Ways of Seeing / Sposoby widzenia
Opening October 17, 2025
Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland
Supported by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
