Poster Gallery on Kramy Dominikanskie is, for poster-lovers, one of the most famous places in the world. It is visited by young and old alike, by school pupils, university students and professors, by Poles and numerous foreign tourists, and above all by collectors. For many years it has been included as a "must" visit in the best-selling international guidebooks to Poland and Kraków. Polish and foreign magazines devoted to travel and graphic design have written extensively about it.

That's hardly surprising, The Kraków Poster Gallery, founded by Krzysztof Dydo in 1985, is the only gallery in Poland specializing in Polish promotional and commercial posters. It is a meeting place for artists and all those interested in poster art.

Since 1994, gallery has become private property, manage by Krzysztof Dydo and Ewa Pabis.

The gallery's main attraction is more than 2,000 poster titles by more than 100 Polish graphic artists, painters and designers, promoting events primarily in the field of culture, theatre, film, music, exhibitions and literature. But there are excellent social, sports and advertising posters there as well. Polish posters have played an important role in modern graphic history since the second world war; at the turn of the 1950s and '60s they were considered the finest in the world. The Gallery was created on the basis of the private Dydo Poster Collection, then numbering almost 20,000 titles (today there are nearly twice as many), initiated during the mid 1950s, the growth period of the so-called Polish Poster School.

Thanks to its enormous collection, the Poster Gallery has organized over a hundred individual and group exhibitions not only in Poland, but in almost every country in Europe as well as in Australia, China, Iran, Canada and the USA. Currently on display is an exhibition in Rome dedicated to Verdi, Hommage a Verdi, a show of nearly 70 Polish posters for productions of Verdi's operas from 1957 to 2001. Another show, The Spanish Theme in Polish Posters, is running in Madrid.

Most often the monographic exhibitions mounted here have been devoted to such celebrities of the Polish poster world as Henryk Tomaszewski, Roman Cieslewicz, Jan Lenica, Waldemar Swierzy and Franciszek Starowieyski. Regular collaborators with the Gallery are such notable Krakow artists as Mieczyslaw Gorowski, Wladyslaw Pluta and Piotr Kunce; Warsaw artists Wiktor Sadowski, Wieslaw Walkuski and Stasys Eidrigevicius; Leszek Wisniewski from Vienna; Leszek Zebrowski from Szczecin; Roman Kalarus from Katowice, as well as very promising young artists.

The Gallery regularly collaborates with public and private cultural institutions, museums and theatres both in Poland and abroad, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and Polish institutions in Rome, Vienna, London, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Prague, Budapest and Sofia.

Among the Gallery's most notable achievements have been the organization of tremendously popular exhibitions: lOO Years of Poster Art, 1891-1992 (600 posters, 1993); Masters of Polish Poster Art (200 posters, 1995); Polish Film Poster - 100 Years of Cinema in Poland (880 posters, 1996); Polish Theatre Posters 1899-1999 (800 posters, 2000); and recently an equally important retrospective show of posters from 1989-2001 from the album Plakaty (300 posters, 2001).

Apart from organizing exhibitions, printing catalogues, posters, postcards, and calendars and reproducing posters, the Gallery also collaborates with various organizations throughout Poland mounting thematic poster competitions.

Ewa Pabis, Krzysztof Dydo DYDO POSTER COLLECTION

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