Zofia Kulik – Self-Portraits and Garden

The exhibition of Zofia Kulik, the leading Polish visual artist best known for photography based works. The title Self-Portraits and the Garden denotes the series of Zofia Kulik's latest photographic works and several of her self-portraits made in recent years, using a complicated method of the multiple-exposure of collage compositions. This time, she directs her look onto herself. Praised for her radical stance, this positive heroine of feminist criticism, looks at herself with her typically inquisitive approach and irony. Standing at both sides of the camera and playing a double role of the artist and the model, she resists the narcissistic temptation, luring the artists who create their own images.

In the series of colour photographs, she returns to a single frame from her Archives of Gestures (1987-1991), which is a series of c. 700 photographs to which another famous artist – Zbigniew Libera, posed. His naked figure, repeated on each photograph, is "dressed" in various arrangements of flowers and plants. The same motif of an immobile silhouette emerges each time from a different configuration amidst the sensuous "garden" of colourful plants. Both her unknown works and her utterances in the accompanying exhibition catalogue reveal Zofia Kulik's interests and artistic fascinations different from those presented in her gigantic project From Siberia to Cyberia, shown at Warsaw's Zacheta Gallery two months ago.

Exhibition curator: Bożena Czubak