Wrocław Contemporary Museum
Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, MWW: a municipal museum of contemporary art, in a round concrete air-raid shelter of 1942 on plac Strzegomski. Beside it stands Train to Heaven, a steam locomotive on end.
Małgorzata Kujda Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
What it is
Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław is a municipal museum, set up by the city in 2011. Its task, in the words of the resolution that founded it, is to build and show an international collection of contemporary art, set against Polish and international art of the second half of the twentieth century, and its holdings include art made in Wrocław in those decades.
Exhibitions fill the building from the ground floor to level 5. The permanent display is the Jerzy Ludwiński Archive, about Ludwiński and the art scene he shaped in Wrocław and in Poland at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. It is part exhibition, part archive and part art store, made from works and papers gathered by the museum and by the Lower Silesian Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. Alongside it run temporary exhibitions.
The shelter
The building went up in 1942 as an above-ground air-raid shelter for the city's civilians, to a design by the architect Richard Konwiarz. It is round in plan, six storeys high, and its reinforced-concrete walls are 1.1 metres thick.
The lettering on the front, było and będzie (“was” and “will be”), is the mural Klepsydra (“hourglass”), a work by the concrete poet Stanisław Dróżdż.
1945 and after
A hospital in the siege, shops in the 1990s.
During the siege of the city in 1945 (see the history) the shelter served as a hospital. In the 1990s it held shops and a pub.
From shelter to museum
In 2010 and 2011 architects of the Wrocław studios CH+ and VROA converted the shelter into a museum. They kept its raw concrete structure on show rather than covering it, and built a cylinder on the roof for a café with a terrace. The museum opened in the building in September 2011.
An exhibition in 2020. The neon at the left is Zbigniew Gostomski's Zaczyna się we Wrocławiu (“It begins in Wrocław”).
Małgorzata Kujda Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Train to Heaven
On the square beside the museum stands Pociąg do nieba, Train to Heaven, by the artist Andrzej Jarodzki, unveiled in 2010. It is a real steam locomotive, the goods engine Ty2-1035, built in 1944, reared up on a length of track with 32 metal sleepers so that it points at the sky. The whole work is 21 metres tall and weighs 82 tonnes.
Jarodzki has said the train stands for reaching for something impossible. The city describes it as a dream fulfilled, going beyond the impossible.
Jacek Halicki Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Visiting
The tram stop on the square is pl. Strzegomski (Muzeum Współczesne). Opening hours, tickets and the free day are on the museum's visiting page, in Polish, and whether the rooftop café is open is on its café page. The city's other museums are on one page.