Keeping painting alive in a post-literate age

We are quietly leaving the age of reading. Jacek Dukaj calls what comes next a post-literate culture, one that no longer explains the world in sentences but transfers it directly, as image and experience. You can mourn that, or you can look at what it means for painting.

It means painting is not a relic. It is the oldest and purest machine we have for the direct transfer of experience, the very thing Dukaj says the new culture runs on. Before words, as John Berger put it, there is seeing. A painting reaches a person scrolling on a phone faster than any essay ever could.

So this collection has two jobs. The first is to gather the strongest Polish painting of this moment and keep it in good condition. The second is to put it in front of people who would never walk into a gallery, through film, podcast, social media and writing that assumes you are clever but not an insider. An institution that is at once virtual and physical.

We collect to keep painting alive in the change. So far it is going well.