Naked Ambition: Zofia Kulik’s pioneering photomontages art

TTo give people an idea of ​​her evolution, famous Polish artist Zofia Kulik likes to compare two of her creative milestones. The former was the focus of her first exhibition as a solo artist in 1989, She debuts her pioneering, technically complex light installations in which stunning patterns of repetitive images are woven. It’s a self-portrait where you look uncertainly through a mandala made of male nudes in small poses, “being pressed by men,” as Kulik puts it.

The second took place almost a decade later in 1997, the year in which that artistic leap into the unknown received final public confirmation and she represented her country at the Venice Biennale. This time it is a resolute queen, posed like Elizabeth I, resplendent in a gown with a wide skirt and sleeves, decorated with the decorative patterns of those naked men.

The first major study in English of Kulik’s unique output follows this remarkable journey, as she confronts the forces that oppress and the possibility of liberation—politically, artistically, and in her own life as well. She was 42 years old when she began her path to becoming one of Poland’s most important artists. It was the late 1980s and a time of new beginnings: Communism was collapsing, and her relationship with the creative and romantic partner she had been with since finishing art school. After feeling frustrated as part of a group whose main role was documenting the activities of others, she found herself at a turning point. “I needed to find a reason to do art again,” she recalls. “I was in a bad state psychologically.” However, she gradually began to feel “free to do things without question. I began to explore myself, my roots in my family, and create my own archives.”

Growing up in a military barracks, Kulik grew up between two worlds: the domestic life of her seamstress mother, and military life, an ideological outside world for her soldier father. “The collision of these factors in my work is crucial, the balance between soft and hard elements,” she says. She also went back to the beginnings of her artistic education, where she initially drew situations from art history, then photographed them. Overturning the classic gender dichotomy between male artist and female muse, she worked with the young artist and model, Zbigniew Lebra, amassing an archive of more than 700 nude photographs of him in just a few years. Using a pioneering technique, she began creating composite images, with multiple exposures of her negatives on light-sensitive paper so that a single work could contain hundreds of images.

“At first I did not plan to use them in such complex compositions,” she recalls. “I started comparing [the art historical] Gestures with those made by Mao or Lenin. It was a direct route from there.” In her work, this language of patriarchal power—particularly the political or religious kind—appears as a recurring pattern that seems to cover everything, such as the patterned rugs the artist’s father used to cover the floors, walls, and tables of his home in Warsaw.

However, the positions of history’s powerful players are literally stripped down, with a little naked man striking a pose again and again, whether that be the spear-wielding Greek hero, the dead Christ, the fallen angel of William Blake, or the Soviet revolutionary gazing toward a bright communist tomorrow. Facing this masculine mass, she places herself, a solitary woman holding her mass at the centre. “I felt like I’d been hit like a nail my whole life,” she says. “I took symbolic weapons and tried to respond to that.”

Body Politics: Five Works by Sofia Kulick

Self-Portrait with a Flag (ed.) 1989
This landmark work marks the first time that Kulik, in her early forties, began experimenting with self-portrait, marking a conscious break from her previous collaborative work. The red flag symbolizes the collapse of communism and that earlier period of its life, when it was used in a mass parade.

The Splendor of Myself (IV), 2005, main image
This is one of a series of works begun in 1997 that are based on portraits of Elizabeth I. Kulick’s interest in Tudor paintings was heightened when she realized that they revealed the implicit influence of Catholic Spain through the fashions of the English court.

All missiles, one missile, 1993
These are details from a large-scale photo-relief installation that Kulik exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1997. His “feminine” side uses television images of decorative beauty, while the “male” side shown here centers the famous monument from Magnitogorsk, Russia’s leading industrial city.

Selected images from the Gestures Archive series (V), 1987
These are some of the first photographs that make up the famous artist’s archive. In this image, the model and her friend, young artist Zbigniew Lebra, strike symbolic poses drawn from art history, including Soviet statues and Catholic iconography that sought to control the cultural imagination in her home country.

Garden (Libra and Flowers) 1996
This cheerful, joyful image stands out in Kulik’s work for her use of vibrant colors and blurring of feminine and masculine symbols. It is part of a series in which the artist used flowers from her own garden.

Zofia Kulik: Works, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now.