Today some great news for the art lovers!

Nearly twenty years after Katarzyna Kozyra, one of the most interesting and well-known Polish artists of the past two decades, made her debut, the National Museum in Kraków is presenting a monographic exhibition of her works.

It includes, amongst others, her “Bathhouse” and “Men’s Bathhouse”, “Blood Ties”, “The Rite of Spring” and “Casting”, as well as a selection of films from her “In Art, Dreams Come True” cycle.

Kozyra’s name has not only come to stand for critical art and contemporaneousness, but has also become synonymous with scandal and incomprehension. Her “Pyramid of Animals” (see picture on the left) thrust contemporary art into the full glare of the spotlight of public debate when, thanks to the manipulations of the media, a heated, nationwide discussion flared up. The voices not only of critics, but also of representatives of various milieux, were raised in dispute over the diploma project of a young artist studying under Professor Grzegorz Kowlaski.

From the very outset, then, the public, either directly, as visitors to the exhibition, or indirectly, stirred up by the media, were drawn into the sphere of Kozyra’s works and, at one and the same time, her life. In her case, the two are indissolubly fused.

Katarzyna Kozyra, sculptress (rzeźbiarka) and creator of video installations (twórca instalacji wideo), films and performance art (twórca filmów oraz występów artystycznych), was born in 1963 and lives in Berlin and Warsaw. She studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’ Department of Sculpture.

Her work engages with the most profound problems of human existence; identity (tożsamość), transformation (transformacja, przemiana) and death (śmierć). She moves amongst the spheres of cultural taboos relating to human corporeality, among the stereotypes and behaviours encoded in the life of society. Transgressing them in all of her works, she thus exposes herself to public criticism.

In 1999, one of her video installations, “Men’s Bathhouse”, received an honourable mention at the 48th International Biennial of Visual Art in Venice.

Come to see it:

November 15th  2011 –  January 15th  2012

National Museum in Kraków – Main Building, al. 3 Maja 1

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)