Women’s Art 1980 – exhibition

1/15Photo of Anna Kutera's lecture (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Natalia's LL: States of Concentration, performance (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Opening with Krystyna Piotrowska in the front, and with Ewa Partum's photomontage-cycles, Self-identification from 1980 on the wall (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Opening with Ewa Partum's Self identification cycles in the background (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Opening with Krystyna Piotrowska in the photo. In the background Natalia LL's Pyramid, 1979 (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Opening with the curators, Krystyna Piotrowska and Izabella Gustowska (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Photo of Ewa Partum's performance: Women, Marriage is against You! (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Maria Pinińska-Bereś: The Well of Pink, 1977 (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Maria Pinińska-Bereś: Banner, 1980 (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Maria Pinińska-Bereś' sculptures from the cycles Psycho Furniture, 1968 (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Photo of Maria Pinińska-Bereś's performance: The Washing I. (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Photo of Maria Pinińska-Bereś's performance: The Washing I. (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Krystyna Piotrowska: Installation (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Teresa Tyszkiewicz' photos on the left, Krystyna Piotrowska's drawings in the center (courtesy of ON Gallery)

1/15Anna Kutera: I'm decide [sic!] about my hairstyle, not fashion dictatores, from the cycles Situations stimulated - Hairstyles , 1978 (courtesy of ON Gallery)

The first national exhibition of the practices of Polish women artists interested in negotiations of feminine subjectivity was organized by two artists who run the gallery associated with the Fine Arts Academy. Izabella Gustowska, when asked about the concept of the show, said she had been familiar with most of the artists from previous exhibitions at ON except for Ewa Partum, whom they invited due to her clear-cut artistic position, and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, whom, in turn, they wanted to honor as a pioneer of a certain kind of sensitivity. This was why the “L”-shaped gallery’s smaller room was devoted entirely to Pinińska-Bereś. The pink-quilted fluid rug spilling out of her Well of Pink ran across the floor of the larger room above, where the works of the younger artists were on display together with photographic works, films, and works on paper. The invited artists presented performances or live lectures (except for Krystyna Piotrowska, Teresa Tysziewicz probably made a comment to her movies) during the two-day symposium opened by speeches of the theorists Alicja Kępińska and Jerzy Ludwiński. What the different realizations had in common was, in my view, their focus on the issue of space and the representations of the subjectively understood feminine body.

“Although the exhibition had not been thought as a feminist demonstration, the title provoked questions about distinguishing the characteristic of art created by women artists—their peculiar features and goals. The organizers wanted to provoke such a discussion and posed questions that had never been asked in Poland before. […] I do not say that nothing like women’s art does exist, because art has no sex (is sexless),” wrote Grzegorz Dziamski. “But look at what women artists do and wonder if in the pieces presented by them there is something you will not find anywhere else—another sensibility, other imaginations, a different approach to the world.”[1]

Beside the Polish Film Chronicle that reported on Partum’s performance, the exhibition was not reviewed in the media and stayed forgotten for a long time, mentioned only in Dziamski’s articles on women’s art and in the catalogs of Presence III and ON Gallery. The thematic was continued by Gustowska in the “Presence” exhibition cycle in the 1980s and 1990s.

Detailed description of the exhibition

Document: Izabella Gustowska: WHY? (1998)