2024-04-23
Zbigniew Libera is one of the most important critical art artists in Poland. In his art he explores issues such as mass culture and media manipulation, consumerism, gender stereotypes and taboos related to the body. This interdisciplinary artist, who uses a variety of media, has been creating since the 1980s. His skeptical and reflective attitude to reality results in art that thoroughly comments the phenomena present in society.
The summer of 1982 was a tough time for Libera. Several months after the opening of his first exhibition, the artist was arrested by the Security Service. He was accused of collaborating in printing the underground press. A military court in Łódź city sentenced him to prison custody, and he spent a total of one and a half years in Łódź and Hrubieszów cities. This period the artist later described as significant in the formation of his artistic sensibility.
In the second half of the 1980s, Libera created a series of photographs entitled, not coincidentally, "Patients." Since 1986, he had been working in the mental hospital in Pabianice city as a therapist. In the hospital workshop he taught drawing and painting. The interaction with patients inspired the artist what resulted in an analytical documentary of individuals and the functioning of the hospital institution.
In 1997, Jan Wojciechowski, then curator of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale invited Libera to participate in the exhibition. The artist wanted to present an installation that he had created a year earlier entitled "Lego. Concentration Camp". The work, now an icon of post-1989 Polish art, was highly controversial at the time. Eventually, Wojciechowski refused to show it, and Libera completely renounced his participation in the Biennale in defense of his art.
At the end of the 1980s, Libera lived with the Kwiekulik duo and collaborated with Zofia Kulik on her photographs as a model. Kulik took about 700 photographs of naked Libera in various poses. A dark background, the man in the center and floral elements which he is covered with are the elements that unite this series. The artist's bony silhouette gives the impression of vulnerability, his nakedness emphasizes male sexuality, and the poses expose the communist iconosphere, which Kulik was inspired by when developing the concept for the work.
Zbigniew Libera has experience also as a pedagogue. At the turn of 2008 and 2009, he ran a guest art studio at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague. He has formulated his didactic programme on the basis of the Oskar Hansen's Open Form theory, diversifying it with his original teaching methods which include creating and simultaneously documenting created artworks.
