Friday, December 6 – Sunday, December 8
Gunia Nowik Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Booth 9

Gunia Nowik Gallery participate in Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 with Teresa Gierzyńska, marking both our first Art Basel presentation and a major milestone in the gallery’s mission to foster meaningful conversations across generations, geographies, and identities.

Active since the 1960s and recently rediscovered, Teresa Gierzyńska (b. Rypin, Poland 1947) continues to be one of the most significant feminist artists working in Poland today. Gunia Nowik Gallery’s presentation, carefully selected with the artist, includes pieces from her key series: The Essence of Things (1973 – 1975), About Her (1976 – 1995), and Black, White, and Green (1984 – 1994), which offer an overview of the artist’s practice and investigate themes revolving around female identity, one’s own corporeality, the erotic and psychological tension in relationships, and the roles marked by society for women.

The selection forms a continuum with the group of Teresa’s works recently exhibited at the Walker Art Center in the group show curated by Pavel Pyś, Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s (November 11, 2023 – March 10, 2024), which later traveled to the Phoenix Art Museum, and just one week after Art Basel Miami Beach opens in the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Gierzyńska’s work, often experimental, centers on photography and its duplication techniques, using methods such as thermocopy, aniline dye, and her signature ‘press-out’ process. About Her forms the core of the booth, in which the artist implements her own image through a feminist lens to both record her emotional experiences and shifts, as well as create universal situations with which women of different ages and backgrounds can identify. Works from Black, White, and Green use color to represent mood and emotions, while The Essence of Things critiques objectified depictions of women, addressing the banality of female desires in pop culture.

The artist has developed her own language to speak about the female experience and emotions, as she herself says, recognizing and naming them was for her an important element in the process of reclaiming herself, her autonomy. Gierzyńska’s practice is part of the long-lasting process of the emancipation of women in and through art, in which photography played an important role.

Artist’s bio:

Born in 1947 in Rypin, Poland. In 1964-65 she went for an educational trip to Canada. In 1965-1971, she studied at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in prof. Tadeusz Łodziana’s sculpture studio and prof. Oskar Hansen’s Solids and Planes design studio. Since the 1960s, photography and its duplication techniques such as thermocopy or photocopy have become the main tools for the artist’s exploration of the representation of women and their role marked by society. Her most known cycle About Her proposes an investigation or introspection within the female identity, the mystical version of feminism, where the photographs are accompanied by adjectives – meaningful titles given to the pictures: Dangerous, Independent, Unapproachable, Mature, Cold, Worried, Thirty Years Old, Useless, Left-handed, Velvety, Caresses, Ful of Hope. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Image captions:

1. Teresa Gierzyńska, Untitled (from Essence of Things series), 1974, print by transfer, acrylic, 50 x 50 cm