The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków invites you to an exhibition that will remind you of the extremely colourful and diverse work of Józefa Kogut (1902-1979) - a master of applied arts and crafts. This will be the first opportunity to see the entire legacy of this phenomenal artist, stored in the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. The collection contains nearly 200 works of art - stunning ornaments and paintings on fabric, wood and paper. Together they form a representative sample of the artist's unique imagination. The works of the artists invited to contribute to the exhibition will also testify to her extraordinary inspirational power.
In the spring of 1913, the Krakow Studios - an association promoting new trends in arts and crafts - was founded at the Industrial Museum in Krakow. Among the six women dubbed ‘artists of the people’ by the contemporaneous press, who ended up at the experimental batik studio, were the three Kogut sisters. The eleven-year-old Józefa turned out to be the most hard-working and most talented of all. Her works - fabrics, wooden bowls, plates and boxes of chocolates decorated with paintings - characterised by her hallmark style, sold very well, and brought her a tremendous success - a medal and the Grand Prix at the Exhibition of Decorative Art and Design in Paris in 1925, which she shared with her sister. The studio went defunct in 1926, but Józefa never gave up applied arts. In 1955, she was accepted as a member to the Association of Polish Artists. Between 1952 and 1968 she worked with Cepelia. In 1980, a large part of her oeuvre comprising nearly 200 works, was donated to the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow after her passing. The Museum proclaimed 2025 the Year of Józefa Kogut, and the culmination of the celebrations titled Imagination Means Freedom is an exhibition of the entire collection full of delightful ornaments and paintings on fabric, wood and paper - the first display of its kind in history.
