curated by: Andrzej Pałys, Aga Czarnecka

 

Teresa Gierzyńska (born 1947) is known to a limited circle of art collectors and art lovers.

She studied sculpture and graphic arts at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, but her

true passion is for photography - she made her first photographs at the age of twelve.

The exhibition will be showing three series of the artist’s works: “Istota rzeczy” /„ Matter

of Fact”/ from the years 1973 - 1975, “Notatnik” /“Notebook”] from 1975 – 1980 and the

series of double portraits “Pola i Nora” / [“Pola and Nora”], which she began in 1983

and has continued into the present moment.

Teresa Gierzyńska’s art eludes classification – as much as the creator herself, it is

independent and mature.

The “Matter of Fact” is a series of works made in a technique of reprint, which is a combination

of photography and print. The artist uses advertising photographs out of western

magazines, mostly portraits of actors and rock stars, which are then copied and

re-arranged into new compositions. Copies of the images loose sharpness, change

hue, become immaterial, volatile, almost transparent. Perfect bodies and beautiful artifacts

represent aesthetics opposite to those of the then communist era. They are, in

fact, a dream of a better world. The artist reveals here one of the specific features of

popular culture, namely, that it concentrates on the idealizations rather than upon the

realness.

In the sculptor’s “Notebook” Gierzyńska imprints the photographs of the models in the

fragile white fragments of plaster. The technique, as well as the visual effect, are similar

to those used in the “Matter of Fact”, but here similarities end. While the previous

tackled consumerism of pop culture, the latter touches upon the intimate. The images of

the models’ bodies, exposed to rating and judgment in saturated colors of the originals,

now regain their privacy and claim identity versus their prior objectification. Women,

once mute and deprived of their own will, speak out, tell stories of their sensitivities and

apprehensions and ask the embarrassing question: “why nobody likes me?”.

The “Pola and Nora” is par excellence documentary, but Gierzyńska’s artistic sensitivity

lets us into the intimate world of growing up and femininity through the series of

double portraits of the artist’s daughter and her niece. The two women are growing up

on separate continents – Pola in Poland while Nora in the USA – but they meet every

few years. Each of these meetings gets documented by Teresa Gierzyńska’s camera

with photographs of their gradual coming of age. Initially, we see them fooling around.

With time, the girls become young women and with age get more and more attached

to this specific photographic ritual until it becomes indispensable part and the thread of

their meetings, while the whole series becomes more than just a documentary of maturation

and turns into the record of the changing world over the period of more than 20

years. Fashion, photographic techniques, habitat – all in constant change, apart from

intimate, personal relations, which remain unchanged.

All of Teresa Gierzyńska’s works are connected by the ephemeral, sensual and emotional

feminine. It may, therefore, be tempting to analyze her art from the strictly feministic

point of view; the feminine element often received inferior treatment as opposed to

the masculine order proposed as the ‘universal’. Such reading, however, would misses

out on the most valuable characteristic of the artist’s work, which resides in her ability

of keen observation and the spontaneous charm with which she looks out on reality