The exhibition of NATALIA LL, the true icon of Polish political and feminist art in Ernst Museum
Curator: Natalia LL NATALIA LL is a true icon of Polish political and feminist art. For over forty years, she has been producing highly original works that have included paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, sculptures, performance and video art. She is among Poland's top media artists and one of the world's most important feminist artists. In addition, her penchant for formal experimentation coupled with vast knowledge and deep reflection has prompted her to produce many excellent texts. Natalia LL has participated in dozens of exhibitions and had many solo exhibitions in prestigious venues in Poland and abroad.
Body art, in the artist's opinion the most honest method of artistic expression, has been the leading element of her work (performances made in the 1970s.
Her art rooted also in conceptual art, Natalia LL's work has often gone beyond all limits or conventions, as well as current trends or fashions. The multiple threads of her work, as well as the use of various media, pose a lot of problems for art critics who find it difficult to position the artist within the context of contemporary Polish art.
Photography, originally regarded by Natalia LL as an antidote to the powerlessness of painting, has always played an important role in her work. In fact, in her first famous work, the cycle Consumer Art, as well as in many others dating from the 70s and 80s, she employed photography. Later she made enormous paintings, deformed self-portraits on light-sensitive cloth (Mystical and Metaphysical Portraits, 1987 cycle) that combined the essence of photography with that of painting.
Over the years, the established practice of Natalia LL has taken on various shades: in her work, a significant element of Polish art for the last three decades, Natalia LL would never adhere to a single solution and has never definitely opted for a single trend. She has seen the limitations of various trends, such as conceptualism, and managed to overcome them and find other solutions, based on her intellect, emotions, and enormous sensitivity, especially visible in her most recent work.
Natalia LL (Lach Lachowicz) was born in 1937 in Zywiec. Since 1957 she has been living in Wroclaw, where she studied at the State High School of Fine Arts, 1957-63. In 1970, she co-founded an artistic group and gallery called PERMAFO. In the mid-1970s, the artist joined the international feminist art movement. She soon became one of its most outstanding representatives. She organized the first feminist exhibitions in Poland to use the term "feminist".
Organizers:
The Culture and Art Centre in Wroclaw (Osrodek Kultury i Sztuki we Wroclawiu)
director: Piotr Borkowski
Lower Silesian Art Festival of the Culture and Art Centre in Wroclaw: (Dolnoslaski Festiwal Artystyczny Osrodka Kultury i Sztuki we Wroclawiu)
director: Bronislaw Kowalewski
Műcsarnok - Kunsthalle, Budapest
general
director: Gábor Gulyás
Cooperation:
Polish Institute, Budapest
director: Arkadiusz Bernas
Patronage:
Bogdan Zdrojewski - the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland
Rafal Jurkowlaniec - Marshal of Lower Silesia
Media Partners:
TVP Wroclaw, art periodical "Format" , monthly periodical "Odra"