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with its congenial layout. This was a true departure from the previous, dead-serious image of the contest. It featured both awards concentrating on the technical merits and the neo-conceptual approach, i.e. extended to other media and performance. It was not only a good decision, showing a distance towards painting as something hermetic, it also proved the curators and artists had a sense of humour. Apart from the aporia of extended imaging and pictoralism, the other phenomenon which seems to have entered the Wrocław competition is t e n s i o n between the opening world of images and deepening discipline of painting. In this catalogue of the 10th Competition, Pukocz and Sikora mention the simultaneous presence of two poles of young painters’ pursuits9, and say that the distance between those two poles is really creative, becoming a theatrum of our times – a potential field of unlimited opportunity. The pole of the extended pictures accommodates elements of installations, electronic media and “frameless” street art. The other pole, concentrating on the creative process, is still open to the penetration of infinite possibilities of work on paintings: their temperature, degree of illusion, accents of composition, texture, colour, etc. What is fascinating in between those two poles is the presence of visual narrations “told” by the pictures by ways which are only seemingly distant from the stretchers and paints, but in fact – as is the case with video installations – being great-grandchildren of mediaeval polyptychs. When writing about the 9th edition of the Competition in 2009, Anna Lewińska pointed out that “video and installation works ruthlessly exposed the archaic character of the painting formula”.10 I think it’s quite the opposite. Not only do they enrich the exhibition, but also inspire those who paint with a brush. One of the curiosities of the Geppert Competition is the contrast between the neverending, serious discussions about the place and limits of painting in the artists’ works (and to some extent among the experts and jurors) and in the media covering the event. Apart from a few longer reviews, the national papers
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and magazines settle for brief reports, some complimentary mentions and nothing else. It makes you wonder. In the 2007 edition catalogue, Adriana Prodeus and Katarzyna Roj wrote: “Painting competitions in their traditional form sometimes resemble dog shows – the winner is the one closest to the ideal model, a perfect representative of its breed”. 11 It doesn’t seem to be the case. Of course, the “invisible academia” awards artists. But the true (invisible) medals of such competitions go to... curators. After all, they act according to trends and will do everything to allow the “invisible academia” to benefit from this mounting confusion known as young painting. They are the bearers of the “ideal models” and the painting world must adapt to them. Those non-practitioners who are simply interested in art will find the Geppert exhibitions especially valuable as they offer opportunities to “read” works of art through what is communicated aesthetically. It is an important alternative in the world of trashy, banal images around us – ranging from street advertising and tabloid press to television with its thousands of channels. That is why it is so important to acknowledge what is creative in pictures, the way the previous and current editions of the Geppert Competition have done, in 2009 and now, in 2011. Two years ago the concept of painting narratives without frames may have been controversial, but it was clearly stated – the murals were not only treated as one of the forms of painting, but a perpetual source that never dries out (see Lascaux, Giotto or Banksy). Also, “pictures at large” 12 are not as much dull electronic recordings as hermeneutically processed images with multiple layers of meaning, e.g. showing a very creative but disabled person. In terms of narration, they often form larger visual “novels”, like in crime stories with appended illustrations. For those slightly more in the know, the Competition likes to use various references to the history of art or hilariously deceptive utopias.
ratorial team, so the 2009 and 2011 editions seem to return to the original idea. Except that it is now an entirely different level of awareness. Contrary to what the participants concentrated on back in the 90’s, with their simplicity of associations, for the last few years the Competition has featured more sophisticated, labyrinthine narrative games in the field of tension between the picture and the painting. There is no place for amnesia. We are glad – just as the curators are – that the entrants do not forget about painting, the medium they work in. Indeed, it seems that those narrative, picture-novel, even anecdotal raids may accommodate potential discoveries for painting itself, the genre which has been deemed “finished” several times in the last decades but now survives rather nicely. Also thanks to the Geppert Competition in Wrocław.
It was then postulated that practising painters should be more involved in the cu-
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