“Women Live for Love,” announced the title to Teresa Gierzyńska’s exhibition, broadcasting an essentialist declaration in order to complicate it. Curator Joanna Kordjak offered a decidedly feminist take on Gierzyńska’s oeuvre, bringing together works from three series dating to the 1970s and ’80s consisting of photographs, photomontages, and press prints portraying women. At that time, the Warsaw-based artist was particularly interested in material experimentation, messing with mechanical reproducibility by tinting her black-and-white photographs with synthetic dyes or pressing images cut from magazines onto plaster or aluminum. Such subversion of the reproducibility supposedly inherent to the photographic medium—almost all of the works exhibited at Zachęta were unique or were printed as a single edition—dovetails with the way Gierzyńska also undermined conventions of portraiture. She tended to turn her attention to fragments, such as the nape of a neck or the crook of an elbow, rather than capture a subject directly.

The “O niej” (About Her) series, 1979–, the backbone of Gierzyńska’s oeuvre and focal point of the exhibition, includes many such partial perspectives of the artist herself and later of her daughter as well. The gelatin silver print Tęsknota (Longing), 1986, for instance, depicts the side of the artist’s torso and her arm, softly blurred, stretching backwards her lips, stained pink with aniline, graze the upper edge of the picture frame. From the same series, the small, nearly square photograph Udręczona II (The Tormented II), 1980, traces the diagonal of a lower leg peeking out from under bedsheets and the outline of draped forearms, ghostly from overexposure. These intimate views are emblematic of the vulnerable and sensual qualities of this decades-long project, its affective nature underscored in the works’ titles, which also included the likes of Kalkulująca (Calculating), 1979; Pełna nadziei (Hopeful), 1980; Zdecydowana (Determined), 1980; Histeryczna (Hysterical), 1981; Opuszczona (Abandoned), 1983; and Dumna (Proud), 1985. Gierzyńska sought to convey a femininity defined above all by its mutability. Part of a generation of artists concerned with how a burgeoning sense of the personal as political might inflect artmaking, Gierzyńska was less invested in subjectivity than in constructing an abstracted impression of woman. Her myriad self-portraits are “about her,” and she is always becoming: forged by societal projection but also constituting herself. Such is the ambivalence that permeated the two decades of Gierzyńska’s work exhibited at Zachęta. The feeling was particularly palpable in what could be a playful illustration of constrained self-expression in Pomnik (Monument), 1975, from the series “Istota rzeczy” (The Essence of Things), 1973–75, where eyes, lips, and eyebrows cut from fashion magazines are collaged in a column. Or in Dwurnika (Dwurnik’s), 1980, from “About Her,” which shows a swath of the artist’s naked back stamped with the last name of her then husband, artist Edward Dwurnik, and his hand applying the final A, signaling the possessive in Polish. In fact, the carving out of a space for herself and her work in a relationship dominated by Dwurnik’s painting career is a pressing subtext in “About Her.” Among the most poignant works in the exhibition were a selection of five photos taken in the bathroom of an apartment in Worpswede, Germany, in 1984 and hung in a tight row on one wall. Accompanying her husband on a residency there and without a place to work, Gierzyńska recast the lavatory as a studio: In Znowumamokres (IHaveMyPeriodAgain) and Pewna (Certain), her moving body is rendered wispy by long exposure, almost evaporating from the cramped quarters cluttered with toiletries. Here, photography allowed her to occupy and reinscribe space, pointing to the way in which her work was akin to a place she could enter—something like a room of one’s own.

— Camila McHugh