Teresa Gierzyńska
Teresa Gierzyńska is a photographer and visual artist living in Warsaw. In 1964–65, she took an educational art trip to Canada. Thereafter, from 1965 to 1971, she studied at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw as part of Prof. Tadeusz Łodziana’s sculpture studio and Prof. Oskar Hansen’s “Solids and Planes” design studio. Especially the latter was influential in terms of the artist’s future trajectory, as he urged his students to experiment with new materials. Gierzyńska stopped working with sculpture due to health issues, and photography and duplication techniques such as
thermocopying and photocopying became her main tools going forward from the 1960s. Her photographic work, however , is quite invested in the study of near-sculptural figures. Images became the primary means by which to study the position of women in society and their politics of self-representation. This photographic output is a record of performative practice for the camera in which the artist depicts her own body in spaces designated as being for women—the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom. She thus turned her home into a stage for creative work instead of for female alienation. The works from the series “About Her” depict her acting out different states. They further test and confirm female identity by way of adjectives added to describe the topic of each work. The artist uses prints as a starting point, going on to treat them by adding color and paint—which allow her to emphasize different qualities and add dynamism to her compositions. Beyond her large body of work based on self-portraiture, Gierzyńska has also used photographs from magazines to create collages examining the popular canons of the female body as tools of oppression. This series of works shows the flipside of the self-depicted female author of “About Her.” The magazine collages are images of women as seen via a male gaze. The artist herself speaks of her work as engaged in a feminist struggle: “My fight and being on the side of women is manifested in works that speak in a hushed voice about their nuances, sensitivity, and richness.” D.M.
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