ink, cotton, 100 x 72 cm on the reverse of the author's patch: EWA KURYLUK/TUCH 5/100 x 74 cm
origin: private collection, Cracow
Ewa Kuryluk (b. 1946, Cracow) painter, art historian, writer. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1970. She is also a graduate of art history at the Jagiellonian University. She participated in the "For Improvement" movement, co-founded the "Smietanka" group. She founded the "Amici di Tworki" foundation and cooperated with Amnesty International. In 1981 she moved to New York. In 1982 she co-founded the quarterly "Zeszyty Literackie" in the US, which found its headquarters in Paris a year later.
In the late 1970s, she stopped doing easel paintings and began drawing extremely precise, sharp outlines of images (usually of nude female and male figures) on pieces of white cotton or silk - loose, soft, capable of being freely shaped in any gallery space (installation Three Chairs, 1982) and outdoors (Autumn in Princeton, 1984). These delicate textile "voiles," "shrouds" or even stripped human "skins," spread on chairs, hung on walls or laid on the floor or stretched between trees, arranged as intimate situations between two people, defenseless in their nakedness, exposed to the curiosity of spectators-viewers, sometimes make a poignant impression. Especially when the sharp pencil seems to hurt the thin layer of soft, translucent, ephemeral fabric. In these works, the artist refers to the iconographic representation of St. Veronica's shawl and the related idea of the ephemeral trace - the reflection of the tormented human body on the shroud that covers it (she also dedicated her dissertation Veronica and her shawl to it, Polish edition 1998). "Veils" and "shrouds" by Kuryluk, however, deviate from Christian symbolism. While they depict suffering, they are mainly a record of individual emotions, an expression of biological fascination with life, arranged in a spectacle of memory and love, and usually strongly expose sexuality (Winter Man and Winter Woman - fragments of the installation Winter in North Carolina, 1989). Because of this very aspect, they are sometimes categorized as examples of "body art."
Source: Culture.pl
