From the "Consumer Art" series, courtesy of Foto-Medium-Art Gallery
The exhibition's focus is on moves Natalia LL made between conceptual art and body art, making use of ambiguous connotations to create attention-grabbing works pushing viewers into deeper thought about what they're really seeing, and what the artist is really saying behind the sensual allure.
With a technique based on irony and spontaneity, Natalia LL has taken prevailing attitudes and stereotypes to create new symbols, opening up the art form to more flexible parameters of representation and of the linguistics used to discuss them. Her visual code is based on opposing forces within society - capitalism, communism, materialism, sensuality, mass production and the place of women within the scope of these forces.
As the exhibition curators explain,
Through the penetration of the subject/object body, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz develops visual archives and photographic series that are radical and direct consequences of an artistic approach built around a forceful feminist personality. Registering a state means, above all, describing relationships and transmitting women’s resistance, power, and infinite nobleness, revealed now as sexually active women.
Natalia LL, from the "Animal Art" series, courtesy of upp gallery, Venice
The exhibition in Venice places the focus on two series from the 1970s - Post-Consumer Art (1975) and Animal Art (1977), which toy those notions - albeit in a very serious way, undermining patriarchal norms of the communist regime under which they were created.
Natalia LL (Lach-Lachowicz) was born in 1937 in Żywiec. Her unusually abundant, multifaceted oeuvre might take its motto from one of her texts from 1987: "Art is the search for freedom. Freedom is a goal in and of itself, and art realizes that goal". Her art is experiencing a revival in recent years, with growing interest in feminist art of the communist era. The young Polish artist Karol Radziszewski made the film America Is Not Ready for This, following her trail through New York circles of the late 1970s to piece together a portrait of the artist across the Atlantic, and her uniquely intimate practice.
The upp gallery in Venice was established on Guidecca Island in 2009, with the aim of promoting young Italian and international artists, while exploring the wide range of contemporary artistic practices.
Natalia LL - The Grammar of the Body is on show between the 28th of May - 8th of August 2013, presented as part of events accompanying the 55th Art Biennale. For more information, see: www.galleriaupp.com
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Press release