In the 1950s, Professor Zdzisław Kępiński, director of Poznań Museum at the time, began collecting works of contemporary Polish artists. In June 1957, they were presented at a permanent exhibition. Among them, the works of colourists predominated, who enjoyed particular interest from Kępiński. In their work, he saw the continuation of the tradition of Polish impressionism, which had been the subject of his research interests for years. His friendship with artists, especially with Piotr Potworowski, who returned to Poland in 1958, contributed to the rapid expansion of the collection with works of other modern creators. Kępiński had a pioneering approach to creating a museum collection for the time. He bought works often coming directly from painting studios, and some of the paintings were created from his curatorial inspiration. In this way, large–format canvases by Piotr Potworowski, Tadeusz Brzozowski and Aleksander Kobzdej were added to the collection.
Kępiński‘s innovative curatorial strategy contributed to the creation of an impressive collection, which for many years was the only collection of Polish art after 1945 that could be admired in Polish museums. The exhibition could be seen only until the mid–1960s. For the next few decades, the Gallery of Contemporary Art had no exhibition space, but Kępiński‘s successors expanded the collection he started.
In 2001, a new wing of the Poznań National Museum was opened, enabling the exhibition of contemporary art collections. On an area of 1000 meters, on the so–called Lower Gallery and Middle Gallery, currently more than 160 works of art are presented, which is only a small, representative fragment of the collection. The exhibition does not have a chronological arrangement, but focuses on showing the most important phenomena of Polish contemporary art. The audience can admire here both paintings, sculptures, as well as spatial objects, photographs and videos, the diversity of which corresponds to the plurality of trends and directions of research in art in the period after the Second World War to the first decade of the 21st century.
In addition to the works maintained in the style of informel, which appeared in Poland in the second half of the 1950s thanks to Tadeusz Kantor, works of artists practicing surrealism are also presented. Special place is taken here by the works of the II Krakow Group, Jadwiga Maziarska, Maria Jarema, Jonasz Stern, and also Andrzej Wróblewski related to the Krakow environment, who in his shocking presentations showed unprecedented cruelty of war. The museum has several dozen canvases by Jerzy Nowosielski in its collection, as well as numerous abstract works, including Henryk Stażewski‘s works classified as geometric abstraction, Stefan Gierowski‘s abstract coloristic searches, or compositions based on the game theory by Ryszard Winiarski. The unique Detail by Roman Opałka, one of two paintings counted with a colorful background, is also presented on the permanent exhibition, as well as large–format canvases by Edward Dwurnik, Leon Tarasewicz and Tomasz Ciecierski. In 2018, the Contemporary Art Gallery was partially rearranged. Previously unshown works from the museum‘s collection appeared on the exhibition, such as canvases of painters from the circle of new figuration, the NEO–NEO–NEO group (Jan Dobkowski and Jerzy Ryszard Zieliński) or Andrzej Pawłowski.
