Katarzyna Kukuła
born 1987
Katarzyna Kukuła graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow with a degree in painting. In her figurative paintings she focuses on the questions of female subjectivity, bodily vitality, autonomy, and ecstatic pleasure. With the use of surrealist stylistics, the artist depicts the female body as a part of the sphere of nature and its sexual energies as cosmic forces. In ‘The Big Bang’, the female orgasm is identified with the beginning of the universe; in ‘Constant dropping wears away a stone II’, the artist references a proverb to describe a sexual act between man and woman. They symbolize the forces of nature. Although the arrangement of their bodies indicates male domination and feminine submission, in reality the fossilized body of the woman is the subject defining the situation: it allows its body to be accessed and allows itself to be penetrated. According to the artist, feminine pleasure and the body as its medium symbolize life, which, like the eponymous ‘Phoenix’, is forever reborn. In her search, Kukuła does not shy away from kitsch aesthetics, as well as the legacy of illustration and poster art.
