Kraków – Triennale – Świat
The Triennial in Kraków

Summary/Abstract: In 2003, the organisers of the Triennial in Kraków received more than three thousand pieces of graphic art. The International Graphic Art Triennial has forty-year-long tradition. There were many other competitive graphic art shows organised in different countries, but they didn’t survive as long as the triennial in Kraków. The show is usually accompanied by more than forty carefully arranged satellite shows organised in different towns in Poland. The curators selected 447 pictures which were included in the show. The participants came from Poland, Japan, the United States of America, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Slovakia, Italy, Estonia, the Great Britain, and other countries. The curators couldn’t include as many good pictures as they wanted because of the space limitations. Artists sent to the exhibition lithographs, wood-block and linoleum prints, all kinds of prints from metal plates, serigraphs, offset prints, heliogravures, monotypes, gypsum prints, mixed media and other forms of graphic art. Each forth picture, though, was a computer- generated print. That kind of art, based on black-and-white photographs, dominated the Triennial shows. The simplicity pf computer generated prints can be compared with television and film production. Traditional techniques are less competitive, but they bring more peace and order to the exhibition rooms. Davida Kidd from Canada received the Grand Prix Award for her photo-graphic work. Toshiro Hamano from Japan received Prix d’Honneur Award for his serigraph. The City of Kraków Award was given to Iwona Jaśkowiak-Abrams for her serigraph (she comes from Poland, but lives in the Great Britain). We may assume that the Grand- Prix Award nobilities the simple, poster-like, computer generated art. The award The award given to Hamano suggests that the jurors saw the excellence of the Japanese printing technique. The Polish artist was awarded for poetic metaphor and technical quality of her work. The jurors concentrated this year on symbolic art, abstract geometry, and the beauty of painterly vision. Their decisions documents their understanding of the changes in contemporary art and their openness to novelty.

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