Zbigniew Libera
Born on July 7, 1959 in Pabianice.
Author of objects, installations, video works, photographs, and a precursor of critical art. He began his artistic practice in the 1980s. In 1981, he designed prints in response to the events at the Wujek coal mine as well as leaflets for the Solidarity movement, for which he was arrested at the end of 1982 and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. Between 1983 and 1986 he was active in the Łódź Kultura Zrzuty milieu and the Strych Gallery, where his first solo exhibition was held in June 1982. Together with Jerzy Truszkowski, Barbara Konopka, and Jacek Rydecki, in the mid-1980s he co-founded an alternative formation to Strych, within which they carried out artistic actions, among others, with patients of a psychiatric hospital where Libera worked. They also played in the punk band Sternenhoch. During this time, while taking care of his ailing grandmother Regina G. for over two years, Libera made his first two video works: Intimate Rites, which he called an existential documentary, and Mystical Perseveration, a film showing his grandmother spinning a chamber pot.
In 1984 he also created the photographic works Sleeping Grandma, Regina G., and Grandmother’s Corpse. In the 1980s, Libera produced many photographs and collages, including For Art (1982), Domestic Performance (1984), Madman(1984), Ewa (1984), Magda (1984), Die Indianer, wie sie wirklich waren (1985), Someone Else (1986), Pretty Boy (1986), Hermaphrodite (1986), and The Genius of the Artist in the Psychic Dimension (1986). In the late 1980s, he posed for photographs by Zofia Kulik. Another of Libera’s key works from this period is the 1987 video How Girls Are Trained, in which he explored social patterns and cultural stereotypes transmitted across generations. This work foreshadowed his later projects of the 1990s – modified children’s toys that closely resembled mass-produced series. The artist confronted the schemes instilled in young children and the uncritical fascination with materialistic pop culture that spread after the fall of the People’s Republic of Poland. Among these works were his most famous piece, LEGO. Concentration Camp(1994), which caused a major media scandal, as well as Ken’s Aunt (1994), You Can Shave the Baby (1995), Eroica(1997), and The Doll You Love to Undress (1998).
In the 1990s, Libera began creating objects and installations, often incorporating video. Works from this time include the inscription Christus ist mein Leben (1990), referencing the gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp; The Bather (1991), whose title refers to the term used for a body washed after death by funeral home workers; and, from the same series, Duck (1992) and Signal Segment (1993). A crucial moment in Libera’s career was the exhibition Corrective Devices at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 1996, where he presented a series of instruments and toys (including the aforementioned LEGO. Concentration Camp) addressing the cult of the body and consumer culture, among them: Body Master (1995), Universal Penis Expander (1995), and Birthing Beds. Toy Set for Girls (1996). This critical analysis of the rapidly developing pop culture in Poland after the fall of communism was further expanded in subsequent works.
A natural progression was his exploration of representation and imagery in the rapidly proliferating visual culture. In the Positives series (2002–2003), Libera presented “positive” versions of iconic photographs of wartime tragedies. He continued this idea in the cycle Final Liberation (2003), first published in the weekly Przekrój, where doctored photographs of war-torn Iraq instead showed smiling, joyful Iraqis and American soldiers. Another work that consistently developed this theme, and which was considered a response to the censorship of his work at the Venice Biennale, was the 2004 cycle Masters. On large-format prints, Libera presented five illustrated newspaper articles that were faithful imitations of real pages from popular contemporary Polish newspapers such as Gazeta Wyborcza (and its Magazynsupplement), Polityka, and the 1983 Trybuna Ludu. These fabricated articles were devoted to his “masters” – artists Libera considered among the most important in Polish art: Zofia Kulik, Jan Świdziński, Anastazy Wiśniewski, Andrzej Partum, and Tadeusz Kantor. Carefully prepared and illustrated with photographs (some specially staged for the project), surrounded by authentic advertisements, these texts were never actually published, and the figures they described, crucial to Polish art history, remain little known to the general public. In this project, Libera revealed both his reflections on tradition and art history, and the powerful creative role of the media.
The strategy of producing imitations – faithful but critical copies – which had already appeared in his toys and corrective devices, and his analysis of the image’s essential role in shaping reality, continued to be developed in later works. In 2005, he co-authored with Dariusz Foks the book What the Liaison Officer Is Doing, a fictional diary-novel illustrated with Libera’s photomontages referencing the Warsaw Uprising. The same year, in Photo Albums, he re-photographed images from selected issues of daily newspapers. Another work, The Gay, Innocent and Heartless (2008), consisted of a series of photographs and a fictional partisan’s diary.
Between 2008 and 2009, Libera ran the guest studio Studio of Open Form at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague. He is also the author of the TVP Kultura series A Guide to Art, broadcast since autumn 2012.