The Darkest Shades of Pink: Maria Pinińska-Bereś at the Kunstmuseum Luzern

17._maria_piniaska-bere_transparent_1980_kolekcja_rodzinna.jpg, default, 'Banner' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1980, photo: family archive / promotional materials from the National Museum in Wrocław

#photography & visual arts

The Swiss presentation of Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s solo exhibition is not merely another step towards establishing her work within the Western canon. It is also an opportunity to view her work within the context of the complex history of feminism: Western and Eastern, progressive and reactionary.

Vienna, 1993. Maria Pinińska-Bereś spoke at a conference titled ‘The Feminist Interpretation of Signs and Symbols as Exemplified in Art’. Before that, the artist had taken part in a few events on the western side of the Iron Curtain, however, at the time, her work was not well known in the West – not unlike most of the output of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the West began to discover her, sometimes with undisguised amazement.

When Pinińska-Bereś talked about her own work in Vienna, she was often met with a very cool reception. Not because, in the opinion of the conference participants, her work was old-fashioned – in fact, it was exactly the opposite. As her daughter Bettina Bereś, also an artist, recalls in her book Avant-Garde Between the Kitchen and the Bathroom, about her parents’ art:

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There were voices among those in attendance saying that she was lying, that it was impossible that she could’ve been making feminist-undertoned papier mâché pieces as early as the 1960s (...), given that Judy Chicago dated her ‘The Dinner Party’ to 1974–1979 […]. The atmosphere became rather unpleasant. No one believed her; they simply couldn’t get their heads around the fact that they hadn’t known of such an artist’s existence in Poland, or that it was possible to create art behind the Iron Curtain that was more progressive than in the West. Mum was being asked to prove a negative. Her friends from the free world clearly regarded her as a fraud, or at best a mythomaniac.

Years later, one could take this unfortunate incident and tell it as a funny anecdote showing that Polish women are second to none and despite functioning far away from the epicentres of second wave feminism, they did not lag behind the ‘free world’.

Fortunately, however, we are in a different place today, and we can take a broader view of Pinińska-Bereś’s position in the global history of feminist art, without focusing on the Cold War race for primacy in modernity. The artist’s ambiguous stance on feminism – her practice having developed within the context of emancipation specific to the Polish People’s Republic – along with her formal language, which crystallised in the mid-1960s, ensure that the art of this Kraków-based sculptor remains remarkably relevant to this day.

Living in your wife’s shadow

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'Actions with Kitchen Utensils' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1996, photo: from the archive BWA Bielska Gallery

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Pinińska-Bereś was never a marginalised or forgotten artist, although interest in her work really began to flourish only after her death. She spent the final months of her life preparing for a major retrospective at Bunkier Sztuki, which became her first posthumous exhibition. Another breakthrough came with the exhibition Three Women at Warsaw’s Zachęta in 2011, curated by Ewa Toniak, where the sculptor’s works were presented alongside those of Natalia LL and Ewa Partum as precursors to Western feminist art. In the meantime, the artist’s early work, which was rarely exhibited at the time, became the subject of texts by, among others, Ewa Tatar, and the year 2022 brought another milestone.

In her book Art and the Emancipation of Women in Socialist Poland: The Case of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, published at the time, Agata Jakubowska not only analysed the artist’s entire body of work in depth, including her early sculptures and drawings that were often overlooked, but also significantly revised the previous perspective, situating them not within the context of Western feminist art and Western discourse, but specifically within the history of women’s emancipation in communist Poland. As a result, the artist, although appreciated during her lifetime, yet remaining in the shadow of her more famous husband, Jerzy Bereś, posthumously eclipsed him in the canon of 20th-century Polish art. In the conclusion to her book, Bettina Bereś recalled:

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During my residency in Poznań (...) I spoke to a student, who surprised me by asking: ‘How did an artist with such a strong character handle living his whole life in the shadow of his wife, the great artist?’ At first I thought she'd misspoken, but no – in the consciousness of young people, it was Maria Pinińska-Bereś playing first fiddle.

Today, it is Jerzy Bereś, with his air of a romantic bard and sculptures resembling archaic machines and tools – which could easily serve as props for a film adaptation of An Ancient Tale or a live-action version of The Flintstones – requires intensive curatorial efforts to demonstrate that his work merely appears to be a relic of a bygone era, yet remains worthy of attention. Meanwhile, Pinińska-Bereś’s work is firmly establishing itself within the global canon.

In 2015, her work was featured as part of the The World Goes Pop exhibition at the Tate Modern. Four years later, the artist had her first major solo exhibition abroad at the Approach Gallery in London. In 2024, a retrospective of her work, curated by Heike Munder, Jarosław Suchan and Małgorzata Micuła, was presented at the Four Domes Pavilion in Wrocław. Subsequent instalments of this exhibition were shown in Leipzig and The Hague, and are currently on display in Lucerne, Switzerland.

From home to factory and back again

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 'Under the Pink Flag' exhibition, Kunstmuseum Luzern, photo: Kuba Celej / IAM

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In Lucerne, Under the Pink Flag opens with the sculptor’s early works, which have long remained in the shadow of her characteristic soft, pink sculptures created since the 1970s. The Rotunda series from the first half of the 1960s stands in stark contrast to them. Pink, quilted fabrics appear as if to replace pedestals, upon which rest heavy, bulky concrete forms. Their titles suggest architectural associations, though their small scale and ground-level placement mean they resemble fragmentary relics of pre-Romanesque buildings or elements of urban infrastructure – such as Enzo Mari’s Panettone, i.e. concrete roadblocks.

Just as Janina Ładnowska wrote years ago, a rotunda is also a nineteenth-century ‘women’s outer garment ground-length, circular in shape, flaring outwards towards the bottom, usually finished at the neck with a small collar, with small vertical slits for the arms, fastened with buttons from top to bottom’. Despite the austerity of the material and the architectural associations, Pinińska-Bereś’s Rotundas also veil traces of the female body, though it remains partly hidden within the austere forms. This is most evident in the Rotunda with a Chain, as if cut in half, from which emerges a shape resembling a breast with a chain wrapped around a concrete nipple – it seems to echo the classical motif of Andromeda chained to a rock, but in a brutalist setting.

When we look at the sculptures through the lens of 1970s feminist art, we can treat them as but a step in Pinińska-Bereś’s search for her own language. However, when viewed through a different lens and in the context of the social upheavals of the late 1950s and early 1960s, they appear to be much more than mere exercises. Pinińska-Bereś graduated in 1956, under the tutelage of Xawery Dunikowski, who still enjoyed his pre-war reputation as the greatest Polish sculptor of the era – although he had produced monuments commissioned by the communist authorities, he shielded his students from the doctrine of Socialist Realism. This tension between freedom of expression and an imposed model also characterises the first stage of women’s emancipation in the Polish People’s Republic.

In the first years after the war, society was focused on education, employment and social engagement. The Constitution of July 1952 introduced things like equal pay, joint ownership of property within marriages and the possibility of no-fault divorces. Peasant women broke free from their rural surroundings and jumped on the wave of industrialisation, suddenly employed in professions previously considered male-dominated. This new type of woman, straight out of socialist realist propaganda posters, was promoted countrywide. In the cultural sphere, there was also an ongoing struggle against the established patterns in girls’ literature, in which marriage to a man of good standing was always presented as the most important life goal and the only possibility of social advancement. As Polish poet Wanda Grodzieńska wrote: ‘Literature for young people must be “co-educational”, just like school, university and life’.

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'Rotunda with Votive Offerings' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1961, photo: from the family archive / Marek Gardulski

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In this respect, the Stalinist era brought about rapid changes: women gained access to new professions and roles, often ones that were physically demanding but also highly prestigious and – by the standards of the time – well-paid. This opening naturally came at a cost, and emancipation under communism was possible only under strictly defined conditions, namely through masculinisation. However, with the Thaw, this model, which had been promoted during the implementation of the Six-Year Plan, began to crumble.

This was clearly visible in the art that captured the winds of change: images of Stalin and Bierut began to disappear; scenes of the construction of the Nowa Huta Steelworks and the Korean War were replaced by more intimate and personal topics. Likenesses of female factory workers and tractor drivers gave way to those of young girls and mothers. Women who, just a few years earlier, had secured jobs in physically demanding industrial roles were slowly being pushed back into the home. The tasks assigned to them were changing – motherhood once again became the most important role.

In the book Female Architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communists, Literature & the Emancipation on Women in Post-war Poland (Architektki PRL-u: komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce), Agnieszka Mrozik wrote:

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…although the themes of women’s education, professional life and social engagement (...) had not entirely vanished from public debate, the focus had shifted to issues such as lifestyle, leisure activities, concern for one’s appearance, intimate relationships with a partner, and so on. The model ‘modern girl’ – the central figure of this debate – was, however, disturbingly homogeneous: urban, intellectual, bearing no resemblance to the working-class and/or rural heroines of socialist realist posters, novels and cinema.

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'Love Machine' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1969, National Museum in Wrocław, photo: Magdalena Lorek

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In Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s art, we can see these changes in her shift from Rotundas to Corsets. While in the former a woman’s body was trapped within heavy concrete forms reminiscent of the Bierut-era emancipation, in the latter her body is forced into a far more delicate, though, fittingly, no less constricting corset of traditional gender roles. During the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, in works such as The Love Machine or The Table I Am Sexy, the artist introduces a distinct erotic element into this domesticated context.

However, this aspect is linked not only to the global changes going on at the time, but also to discussions specific to Eastern Europe on ‘free love’, traceable back to the pre-war writings of the feminist and communist Alexandra Kollontai, who opposed the commodification of sexuality and bourgeois conventions, stripped sexuality of its sense of shame, and advocated treating it as a need fundamentally no different from desire or hunger.

It is therefore no surprise that the work of this Kraków-based sculptor was ahead of much of Western feminist art, given that it emerged against a backdrop of complex socio-cultural transformations and emancipatory processes characterised by rapidly shifting trends. As Mrozik wrote:

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We often only realise just how profound this change was, and the immense resources and efforts behind it, when we compare state policy towards women in Poland and other socialist countries with that of certain Western nations, such as the United States or West Germany, where the end of the war often signalled ‘women returning home’.

Art without pronouns

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'Laundry II' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Osieki near Koszalin, 1981, photo: courtesy of Monopol Gallery

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, "Pranie II", Osieki koło Koszalina, 1981, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Galerii Monopol

The attitude of many Polish female artists towards Western feminist discourse – which, despite everything, seeped through the cracks in the Iron Curtain into the People’s Republic of Poland in the 1970s – was cautious, to say the least. With the exception of Ewa Partum and Natalia LL, most women artists distanced themselves from it, for fear of being marginalised and relegated to the niche of women’s art. The quest for creative autonomy following the period of socialist realist coercion also translated into a reluctance to fully identify with feminism. In the most striking cases, such as that of Magdalena Abakanowicz, it resulted in referring to oneself [in Polish] in the masculine form, as a ‘sculptor’, and shunning techniques considered ‘feminine’.

With this in mind, Pinińska-Bereś really does stand out as particularly interesting. Her style, developed in the late 1960s and based on soft fabrics, sensual accents in the form of lips or breasts, and the ubiquitous ‘bed linen pink’, is almost excessively feminine. Her Psychofurniture resembles delicate pieces straight out of a Rococo boudoir or furnishings from an American suburban home in the 1950s. At Poznań’s Galeria ON in 1980, during a women’s art festival organised by Izabella Gustowska and Krystyna Piotrowska, Pinińska-Bereś performed Laundry (Pranie). In a space cordoned off with a rope, Pinińska-Bereś, wearing a pink apron, washes white linen rags and hangs them out to dry on a line. The letters written on each rag become visible, forming the word ‘feminism’. Finally, the artist attaches the apron to a pole, turning it into a pink flag.

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'Landscape Annexation' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1976, photo: courtesy of Monopol Gallery

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, "Aneksja krajobrazu", 1976, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Galerii Monopol

Pinińska makes gestures that are simple yet ambiguous: too absurd to be regarded as a committed feminist manifesto – though in fact it could serve as an illustration of the demand for pay for housework; too serious to be seen as an ironic subversion of feminist aspirations. In fact, it seems to be truly ahead-of-its-time, a foreshadowing of the era of whitewashing and pinkwashing: a cynical corporate display of virtue through the use of progressive slogans held aloft as banners, masking the ever-recurring, exploitative practices. The neoliberal ‘girlboss’ is, after all, a role model just as problematic as the masculinised female worker of the Stalinist era.

If Pinińska-Bereś’s pink flag symbolises a revolution, it’s one that remains unfulfilled and ephemeral. When the artist steps outside of the gallery and marks the landscape, it is not a transformation on an industrial scale in the vein of American land art. The pink paint she uses is washed off the stones by the first rain, the roses she plants do not bloom, and the flag flutters only for a moment. As the artist herself recalled, the recognition of her practice as feminist in the 1970s ‘brought hope to kindred spirits, but also brought disappointment at the instrumental approach of European feminists to art’.

Although we don’t know exactly what she meant by ‘instrumental treatment’, we can, however, surmise how paternalistic the gaze of Western allies might have been upon the practice of an artist from the East, whose own emancipatory achievements had for so long been ignored and overlooked due to deeply rooted colonial legacies.

Feminist fifth columns

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 'Under the Pink Flag' exhibition, Kunstmuseum Luzern, photo: Kuba Celej / IAM

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Does it come as any surprise that Pinińska-Bereś approached second-wave Western feminists with a certain degree of caution when she finally encountered them? It is quite possible that this mixture of hope and disappointment stemmed not from the backwardness of the Polish People’s Republic, but quite the opposite – from her recognition of the limitations of bourgeois white feminism. The ropes dividing her sculpture-rooms and demarcating the space of her performances can be seen not only as a protest against the blurring of the boundary separating art from non-artistic reality, but also as a means of protecting her own voice and challenging the homogeneity of the feminist movement. Although today, when we refer to the art of female artists active in the 1960s and 1970s, we speak of pioneering feminist actions, we perhaps too often forget that, just as with the emancipation processes in Poland under the communist regime, Western feminist currents were not always so progressive.

While fighting for the rights of heterosexual women from the middle class, author of The Feminine Mysthique, Betty Friedan, called lesbians a ‘lavender menace’ and worked hard to exclude them from the National Organisation for Women of which she was a founder. In the 1970s and 1980s, some American feminists fought side by side with the political right to criminalise pornography and sex work. Today, numerous authors who identify as feminists are waging a battle to restrict the rights of trans women and are publishing books combating ‘gender ideology’ alongside the most conservative wing of the episcopate. As Sophie Lewis points out in her book Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation:

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It’s important to understand a long lineage of women, especially middle-class white women, making a calculation that they might be able to individually find a foothold within patriarchy by accommodating themselves to a certain set of disciplines in exchange for provisional protection, while throwing other women under the bus.

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'Screen' by Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 1973, National Museum in Wrocław, photo: Magdalena Lorek

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It is precisely in this context that Pinińska-Bereś’s sculptures seem particularly timely and provocative. Her little pink rooms, screens and pieces of furniture are both unsettling and alluring. One can understand their appeal, just as, in times of growing economic inequality, political unrest and crises, one can understand the temptation to slip into traditional roles in exchange for the promise of care – the temptation to become a ‘trad wife’.

The artist’s works perfectly capture the situation these ‘ideal wives’ have found themselves in – they seem to be retreating into a life straight out of a postcard-perfect image of the post-war American middle class. Everything here appears pleasant, safe and harmless, yet at the same time deeply distorted. Windows and doors are cut out in strange perspectives, like sets from expressionist silent cinema; soft duvets and pillows lay there, inviting, at other times they squeeze into crevices and block the paths of a potential escape. They tempt us to snuggle into them, but who knows if a moment later they won’t suffocate us in our sleep. In this respect, Pinińska-Bereś’s works do indeed seem to be radically ahead of their time. For this is a tragedy that returns first as a farce, and finally as a TikTok trend.

Impossible to clean

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 'Under the Pink Flag' exhibition, Kunstmuseum Luzern, photo: Kuba Celej / IAM

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś clearly struck some raw nerves – the attacks on her art spoke volumes. When the artist performed her piece Laundry at an open-air event in the village of Osiek in north-western Poland, young provocative artists from the Łódź Kaliska group threw their dirty underwear into her wash tub, ‘reducing the artist to the role traditionally assigned to women – that of the one who washes men’s clothes whilst they attend to other, supposedly more important matters’, as Agata Jakubowska wrote. Before that, during her exhibitions in Kraków from the Sculpture of the Year series, her works were regularly vandalised. As her daughter Bettina Bereś recalled:

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No sooner had Mum managed to clean the dirty sculpture – something that could never really be done properly without repainting it – than a mark appeared on it again just a few days later. It was always the same: the imprint of a woman’s shoe, caked in poop.

This particular form of vandalism was tailored to the formal language of Pinińska-Bereś’s soft, delicate sculptures, which, in this respect too, prove to be surprisingly contemporary. Whereas modernism still operated within aesthetic categories drawn from Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s classical definition of art – delighting, moving or shocking – today, as American literary critic Sianne Ngai points out, we perceive art much like online content that engages us: by paying attention to what’s amusing, charming and intriguing. Such content and objects are, as Australian writer McKenzie Wark argues, a kind of commodity fetish on steroids, currying favour with the viewer, promising a momentary escape from brutal reality and, through their passivity, provoking a reaction that is either protective or sadistic. They arouse desire, but also potential aggression, when they strike a nerve of erotic frustration.

The body of work by Pinińska-Bereś, who passed away in the late 1990s, therefore seems in many respects radically contemporary and worthy of study even outside its immediate historical context. It is only today, when the pink, ‘girly’ costume is donned by both progressive feminists and prominent female politicians of the MAGA movement, that Pinińska-Bereś’s eponymous pink flag fully reveals all its nuances, including the darker ones.

_{Maria Pinińska-Bereś}
_{Under the Pink Flag}
_{Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland}
_{Curatorial team: Heike Munder, Jarosław Suchan}
_{28.02.2026-14.06.2026}

Language English

sculpture of the 20th century

maria pinińska-bereś

Feminism

feminist art

feminist art in poland