This exhibition is part of a year-long program by Wschód New York presenting Polish historical and avant-garde voices in dialogue with contemporary positions.
Maria Pinińska-Bereś was a Polish sculptress, an author of installations and environments, performer. She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 1956. Pinińska-Bereś is known to be a pioneer of feminist art in Poland - in her works, with a certain notion of enigmatic ambiguity, she often explored the motif of the female body, which was articulated by variety of materials, colours, objects, and activities stereotypically associated with femininity. The concep- tual and stylistic complexity of Pinińska-Bereś’ oeuvre initially consisted of figurative sculptures combining excessive concrete forms, soft fabrics, and papier mâché.
In my beginnings I felt the urge to redefine sculpture. Freeing the form from statuesqueness became my goal. It was a dra- matic struggle. By giving up the perfect traditional sculpting skills I had acquired and by imposing an unconventional mode on myself I have made a radical breakthrough… I got rid of weight in my works (MPB).
From the early 1970’s Pinińska-Bereś drifted away from a distintive figuration, and endeavored to implement more abstract means to her sculptural language. She began to experiment with more soft, lightweight materials (employing fabrics stuffed with cotton wool and flexible PUR foam) and color pink, which then became one of the emblematic elements of her installa- tion-based works. They evolved into erotically charged, immersive works in the form of spatial installations and sculptures.
Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s works and practices defy easy and unequivocal pigeonholing. They are partly bulky, partly erotic, sub- tle and charged with humor … They articulate the complex existential experience of the artist who in the specific conditions of the Polish People’s Republic, during the Cold War, sought her way out of the tight corset of society’s restrictions and the patriarchal order, as well as her path–as a woman–in the art system (Heike Munder and Jarosław Suchan).
All in all she produced more than 150 sculptures and authored nearly 20 actions. The archival drawings presented in the exhbition are graphical studies and sketches to her sculptural works Window. De-con- struction of the Leaning Tower (1992); Two Graces Commenting on the Departure of the Third (1990); Infanta with Tiny Bell - the Cage (late 1990s); De-construction of the Leaning Tower (1995).
The video recording in The Black Box is a lecture by Maria Pinińska-Bereś that took place on 24th of January1989 at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, PL.
