To give people a sense of her evolution, the lauded Polish artist Zofia Kulik likes to compare two of her creative milestones. The first was the centrepiece of her earliest exhibition as a solo artist in 1989, where she debuted her groundbreaking, technically complex photomontages in which dizzying patterns are woven from repeating imagery. It’s a self-portrait where she peers uncertainly from a mandala made from tiny posturing male nudes, “pressed in by men” as Kulik puts it.
The second was made nearly a decade later in 1997, the year that that artistic leap into the unknown was given the ultimate public affirmation and she represented her country at the Venice Biennale. This time she’s an assertive queen, posed like Elizabeth I, resplendent with a ruff, wide-skirted and sleeved gown, embellished with decorative patterns of those naked men.
The first big English-language monograph of Kulik’s unique output traces this fascinating journey, as she confronts the forces that oppress and the possibility of emancipation – politically, artistically, and in her own life, too. She was 42 when she started on her path to becoming one of Poland’s most significant artists. It was the late 1980s and a time of new beginnings: communism was collapsing and her relationship with the creative and romantic partner she’d been with since art school was over. Having grown frustrated as part of a collective where her chief role was to document the activities of others, she found herself at a turning point. “I needed to find a reason to make art again,” she recalls. “I was in a bad way psychologically.” Yet gradually she began to feel “free to do things without discussion. I started to explore myself, my roots in my family and to create archives of my own.”
Raised in a military barracks, Kulik had grown up between two worlds: the domestic life of her seamstress mother, and the military, ideologically on-message outdoor realm of her soldier father. “The collision of these factors in my work is crucial, the balance between soft and sharp elements,” she says. She went back to the beginnings of her art education too, first sketching poses from art history, then photographing them. Upending the classic gender split between male artist and female muse, she worked with a young artist-model, Zbigniew Libera, amassing an archive of more than 700 nude images of him in a few years. Using a pioneering technique, she began creating photomontages, with multiple exposures of her negatives on photosensitive paper so that a single work can hold hundreds of images.
“At first I didn’t plan to use them in such complex compositions,” she recalls. “I started to compare [the art historical] gestures with those of Mao or Lenin. It was a straightforward path from there.” In her work, this language of patriarchal might – especially the political or religious kind – is shown as a repeating pattern that seems to coat everything, like the patterned carpets that the artist’s father used to cover the floor, walls and tables in his Warsaw home.
Yet the posturing of history’s power-players is literally stripped bare, with a tiny naked man who strikes a pose again and again, be it the spear-bearing Greek hero, a dead Christ, a fallen angel from William Blake or a Soviet revolutionary staring towards a bright communist tomorrow. Against this male mass she pits herself, an individual woman holding her own at the centre. “I’d felt like I was hammered like a nail my whole life,” she says. “I took symbolic weapons and tried to react to that.”
Body politics: five works by Zofia Kulik
Zofia Kulik’s Self Portrait With a Flag (I), 1989. Photograph: © Zofia Kulik
Self Portrait With a Flag (I), 1989
This landmark work marks the first time when, in her early 40s, Kulik began experimenting with self-portraiture, making a conscious break with her previous collaborative work. The red flag refers back both to the collapse of communism and that earlier period in her own life, when it had been used in a group performance.
The Splendour of Myself (IV), 2005, main image
This is one of a series of works begun in 1997 that riff on portraits of Elizabeth I. Kulik’s interest in paintings of the Tudor monarch was sharpened when she realised that they revealed the tacit influence of Catholic Spain through English court fashions.
Detail from Zofia Kulik’s All the Missiles Are One Missile, 1993. Photograph: © Zofia Kulik
All the Missiles Are One Missile, 1993
This is a detail from a huge patterned photomontage that Kulik exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Its “feminine” side uses TV imagery of decorative beauty, while the “masculine” side seen here centres the famed monument from Magnitogorsk, Russia’s flagship industrial city.
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Selected photographs from Zofia Kulik’s Archive of Gestures series (V), 1987. Photograph: © Zofia Kulik
Selected photos from the Archive of Gestures series (V), 1987
These are some of the first images that form the artist’s famous archive. In it, her model and friend, the young artist Zbigniew Libera, assumes symbolic poses culled from art history, including both the Soviet statuary and Catholic iconography that have sought to dominate cultural imagination in her home country.
Zofia Kulik’s Garden (Libera and Flowers), 1996. Photograph: © Zofia Kulik
Garden (Libera and Flowers), 1996
This delightfully playful image stands out in Kulik’s work for its use of vibrant colour and its blurring of feminine and masculine codes. It’s part of a series where the artist used flowers from her own garden.
Zofia Kulik: Works, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now.
