{"id":186374,"date":"2025-12-11T08:47:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T08:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/186374\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T08:47:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T08:47:08","slug":"naked-ambition-the-groundbreaking-photomontages-of-zofia-kulik-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/186374\/","title":{"rendered":"Naked ambition: the groundbreaking photomontages of Zofia Kulik | Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

To give people a sense of\u00a0her evolution, the lauded Polish artist Zofia\u00a0Kulik likes to compare two of her creative milestones. The\u00a0first was the centrepiece of her earliest exhibition as a solo artist in\u00a01989, where she debuted her groundbreaking, technically complex\u00a0photomontages in which dizzying patterns are woven from repeating imagery. It\u2019s a self-portrait where she peers uncertainly from a\u00a0mandala made from tiny posturing male nudes, \u201cpressed in by men\u201d as\u00a0Kulik puts it.<\/p>\n

The second was made nearly a\u00a0decade later in 1997, the year that that\u00a0artistic leap into the unknown was given the ultimate public affirmation and she represented her country at the Venice Biennale. This time she\u2019s an assertive queen, posed like Elizabeth I, resplendent with a\u00a0ruff, wide-skirted and sleeved gown, embellished with decorative patterns of those naked men.<\/p>\n

The first big English-language monograph of Kulik\u2019s unique output traces this fascinating journey, as she\u00a0confronts the forces that oppress and the possibility of emancipation \u2013 politically, artistically, and in her own life, too. She was 42 when she started on her path to becoming one of Poland\u2019s most significant artists. It\u00a0was\u00a0the late 1980s and a time of new\u00a0beginnings: communism was collapsing and her relationship with the creative and romantic partner she\u2019d been with since art school was over. Having grown frustrated as part of a collective where her chief role was to document the activities of others, she found herself at a turning point. \u201cI\u00a0needed to find a reason to make art\u00a0again,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI was in a bad way psychologically.\u201d Yet gradually she began to feel \u201cfree to do things without discussion. I started to explore myself, my roots in my family and to create archives of my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raised in a military barracks, Kulik had grown up between two worlds: the\u00a0domestic life of her seamstress mother, and the military, ideologically on-message outdoor realm of her soldier father. \u201cThe collision of these factors in my work is crucial, the balance between soft and sharp elements,\u201d she says. She went back to the beginnings of her art education too, first sketching poses from art history, then photographing them. Upending the classic gender split between male artist and female muse, she worked with a young artist-model, Zbigniew Libera, amassing an archive of more than 700 nude images of him in a few years. Using a pioneering technique, she began creating photomontages, with multiple exposures of her negatives on photosensitive paper so that a single work can hold hundreds of images.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first I didn\u2019t plan to use them in\u00a0such complex compositions,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI started to compare [the art historical] gestures with those of Mao or Lenin. It was a straightforward path from there.\u201d In her work, this language of patriarchal might \u2013 especially the political or religious kind \u2013 is shown as a repeating pattern that seems to coat everything, like the patterned carpets that the artist\u2019s father used to cover the floor, walls and tables in his Warsaw home.<\/p>\n

Yet the posturing of history\u2019s power-players is literally stripped bare, with a tiny naked man who strikes a pose again and again, be it the\u00a0spear-bearing Greek hero, a dead Christ, a fallen angel from William Blake or a Soviet revolutionary staring towards a bright communist tomorrow. Against this male mass she pits herself, an individual woman holding her own at the centre. \u201cI\u2019d felt like I\u00a0was hammered like a nail my whole life,\u201d she says. \u201cI took symbolic weapons and tried to react to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Body politics: five works by Zofia KulikZofia Kulik\u2019s Self Portrait With a Flag (I), 1989. Photograph: \u00a9 Zofia Kulik<\/p>\n

Self Portrait With a Flag (I), 1989
This landmark work marks the first time when, in her early 40s, Kulik began experimenting with self-portraiture, making a conscious break with her previous collaborative work. The red flag refers back both to the collapse of communism and that earlier period in her own life, when it had been used in a group performance.<\/p>\n

The Splendour of Myself (IV), 2005, main image
This is one of a series of works begun in 1997 that riff on portraits of Elizabeth I. Kulik\u2019s interest in paintings of the Tudor monarch was sharpened when she realised that they revealed the tacit influence of Catholic Spain through English court fashions.<\/p>\n

Detail from Zofia Kulik\u2019s All the Missiles Are One Missile, 1993. Photograph: \u00a9 Zofia Kulik<\/p>\n

All the Missiles Are One Missile, 1993
This is a detail from a huge patterned photomontage that Kulik exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Its \u201cfeminine\u201d side uses TV imagery of decorative beauty, while the \u201cmasculine\u201d side seen here centres the famed monument from Magnitogorsk, Russia\u2019s flagship industrial city.<\/p>\n

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\"SelectedSelected photographs from Zofia Kulik\u2019s Archive of Gestures series (V), 1987. Photograph: \u00a9 Zofia Kulik<\/p>\n

Selected photos from the Archive of Gestures series (V), 1987
These are some of the first images that form the artist\u2019s famous archive. In it, her model and friend, the young artist Zbigniew Libera, assumes symbolic poses culled from art history, including both the Soviet statuary and Catholic iconography that have sought to dominate cultural imagination in her home country.<\/p>\n

Zofia Kulik\u2019s Garden (Libera and Flowers), 1996. Photograph: \u00a9 Zofia Kulik<\/p>\n

Garden (Libera and Flowers), 1996
This delightfully playful image stands out in Kulik\u2019s work for its use of vibrant colour and its blurring of feminine and masculine codes. It\u2019s part of a series where the artist used flowers from her own garden.<\/p>\n

Zofia Kulik: Works<\/a>, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To give people a sense of\u00a0her evolution, the lauded Polish artist Zofia\u00a0Kulik likes to compare two of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-186374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}