New York’s The New Museum is now showcasing Ostalgia – America’s first presentation of art from the former Soviet block countries on such a big scale. The exhibition brings together works by fifty artists from over twenty Eastern European countries, including pieces by Poles such as Mirosław Bałka, Aneta Grzeszykowska and Edward Krasiński. The collection can be seen until September 25th, curated by the artistic director of The New Museum in New York, Massimiliano Gioni.

Ostalgia is an interesting highlight for US residents, whose familiarity with the history of the USSR and the former Soviet block countries is often limited. The exhibition seeks to bring that forgotten reality closer to American viewers, presenting art created in the former Soviet countries over the past fifty years. It tells the story of communism since the 1940s. After leaving the gallery, themes like Yalta, post-soviet regimes, the Prague Spring, Solzhenitsyn, perestroika, Solidarity, the Warsaw Pact, and wars in Chechnya and South Ossetia will be more comprehensible to Americans.
One of the Polish touches is the 1987 sculpture by Mirosław Bałka - Czarny papież i czarna owca (Black Pope and Black Sheep). Poland is also represented by Edward Krasiński – an avant-garde artist who presents a set of suspended mirrors, and experimental film artists Józef Robakowski, Wojciech Bruszewski and Ryszard Wasko.

It is worth remembering that Mirosław Bałka participated in the first and second editions of the ArtBoom Festival.