One of the most influential representatives of the Polish postwar photographic avant-garde,
Zbigniew Dłubak started working on the theme of the female nude around 1958 and continued to do so for the rest of his practice. However, he was never considered an expert in nude photography, a paradox that can be explained by the fact that his nudes always followed modernist logic, serving to make statements on the language of photography, on the processes of sign creation and interpretation, or on the mechanisms of visual perception. Such emphatic theoretical investigations were far more important than the fact that they were carried out on photographs of the naked female body.
When Dłubak was creating his early series of nudes, the way the body was thought and spoken about in Western culture was only beginning to change. This revolutionary shift, however, had little reception in Poland at the time and hardly influenced Dłubak’s work.
His primary context in working on the series Iconospheres and Gesticulations was modernism, with its preoccupation with medium specificity, structuralism and artistic autonomy. From the very beginning, Dłubak’s work on the female nude is highly analytical, the compositions pared down, geometricised, focused on the fragment. Through such abstracting procedures, symmetries and repetitions, Dłubak downplays the erotic element, and the power relationship between artist and model is never overtly acknowledged. What is brought to the foreground is the mechanism of photographic representation and the sign stripped of its meaning – the "pure sign", as it was called by the artist.
The exhibition Body Structures highlights these themes from the artist’s broad-ranging oeuvre. A selection of images from the Gesticulations series (1970-1978), which were created in variants using different models, and sketches and documentation of three Iconosphere photographic installations from 1967-1971, are presented to exemplify Dłubak’s exceptionally consistent and rigorous work with the female body.
The exhibition runs between the 4th of June - 28th of July 2013 at the Sala Juana Sala Juana Mordó/Círculo de Bellas Artes.
Curator: Karolina Zięmbińska-Lewandowska
