GALERIA AT

The AT Gallery, one of only a few cultural establishments of this type in Poland has for many years presented the work of artists engaged in bookarts. The phenomenon of a so-called bookart as a significant aspect of contemporary art has been present on the international arena for several decades. It arose in the late '60's as an authentic reaction on the part of artists to institutionalized and commercialized art circulation. Book objects produced at the time were the effect of an in-depth intellectual reflection by artists who annexed the book as, on the one hand, a carrier of knowledge and, on the other, an object with specific forms and aesthetic and spiritual values. "Book" practice was integrally connected with conceptual reflection in art as well as with concrete visual and sound poetry and mail art. With time specialist presses of such books arose, printing small bookarts series. Specialist bookarts collections were formed and exhibitions began to be organized worldwide. Already in the early '80s the AT Gallery organized bookarts and visual poetry exhibitions of such artists as Cezary Staniszewski, Joanna Adamczewska, Waldemar Petryk, Waldemar Kremser, Jarosław Kozłowski, Małgorzata Gryglicka, Joanna Hoffmann, Andrzej Szewczyk, Tomasz Wilmański and foreign artists - Ann Noël, Emmett Williams, Babsi Daum, Jürgen O.Olbrich, Simon Streather, Kurt Johannessen, Michael Winkler, Bernard Heidsieck.
In 1990, together with the Raczynski Library in Poznan the Gallery organized the first bookarts show in the BOOK AND WHAT NEXT 1 cycle. It was one of the first shows of this kind in Poland. The participants included Joanna Adamczewska, Tomasz Konart, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Andrzej Szewczyk, Cezary Staniszewski, Tomasz Wilmanski. The first edition of BOOK AND WHAT NEXT 1 also included the show (at the Sienkiewicz Museum) of books and prints published for 35 years by the Berlin Rainer Verlag publishing house. The whole Rainer Verlag exposition, numbering over 150 items by the most outstanding artists from around the world, was given as a gift to the Raczynski Library by Rainer Pretzell, the press's director.
curator of exhibition Tomasz Wilmanski