( the text was published in: THE BROOKLIN RAIL REVIEW. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON ARTS, POLITICS AND CULTURE. INDEPENDENT AND FRE, ArtSeenFebruary 2025)

Installation view: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany, 2024–25. Courtesy Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst
November 9, 2024–February 23, 2025
Leipzig, Germany

I wonder if Sofia Coppola is familiar with the work of the Polish artist Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Pinińska-Bereś passed away in 1999, a year before The Virgin Suicides premiered in Poland, but one suspects she would have found a kindred spirit in the American filmmaker. The two exemplify a distinct strand of feminism whose concerns are more expressive than militant, tinged with a healthy dose of irony, and threaded through with ambivalence—much like the female character itself. “Art, to be female, should reach out for the centuries-old female techniques,” Pinińska-Bereś once wrote. GfZK’s comprehensive survey of the artist’s body of work—the first of its kind in Germany—is an effective showcase of Pinińska-Bereś’s instrumentalization of decorative surface and strategic passivity as tactics to communicate a specifically feminine sensibility of experience.

Her performance piece Laundry (Laundry I) (1980) is a case in point, and its elaborate score is worth quoting in full:

A space delineated by white posts connected by a thick washing line. In front, a label with the title, date, and name. Inside the fence stand two metal tubs with water. In one there is a metal washboard that I used years earlier to wash my child’s diapers. I enter the installation space in a long white dress, carrying an armful of cloths for washing. I tie a pink apron over my dress, roll up my sleeves, and begin to wash the cloths, precisely and methodically; then I throw them into the second tub to rinse, wring, and whisk off. I hang each washed cloth on the fence line. A pink letter has been painted on each cloth. Hanging them, I create the word, “Feminism.” Finally, I remove the ribbon from the apron and hoist the apron on a staff, turning it into a flag. This flag is secured in a stand, towering over the installation.

Is the work ironic or critical? Mocking or revelatory? The ambiguity that the piece is steeped in is quintessentially representative of the artist’s outlook and the simultaneous depth of insight and levity of position that is her chief legacy.

Another thing that Coppola and Pinińska-Bereś share is an affection for a particular shade of pastel pink (think the color schemes of Marie Antoinette, The Virgin Suicides, or the cover of Coppola’s professional autobiography, Archive)—the latter considered it so significant, in fact, that she took care to post factum color in the parts of black-and-white photo documentations of her performance pieces with a pink pencil to make sure the color element that was always present in the form of, by turns, a flag, an outfit, or a written message, wouldn’t get lost to the archive’s monochromatic leveling.

Installation view: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany, 2024–25. Courtesy Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst.

There is a reason Pinińska-Bereś’s oeuvre so readily suggests affinity with contemporary culture: with its biomorphic shapes, seductively tactile surfaces, and that millennial-magnet pink, her work’s aesthetic comes across as astonishingly contemporary. At the same time, it just as easily invites comparison to a host of practices contemporaneous with itself and concerned with the same host of thematics—Eva Hesse (Pinińska-Bereś’s Rotunda with a Chain [1963] is nothing if not an avant la lettre, brutalist Ringaround Arosie [1965]) and Louise Bourgeois being the readiest analogue—all the more impressively so given that Pinińska-Bereś’s art developed and existed in the socio-political circumstances of the near-complete cultural isolation of Iron Curtain-era Poland, far removed from the influences and the discursive spaces available to her Western peers.

Pinińska-Bereś studied sculpture at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1956. The earliest pieces in the GfZK exhibition, the striking “Rotunda” series, date from the years shortly following. Weighty concrete mounds resting atop brilliantly colored pink and purple baby blankets, the works are penetrated and wrapped by chains, chiseled in such a way so as to deny the viewer the gratification of either a symmetrical view or a full grasp of the amorphous form from any single viewpoint. They demand to be endlessly circumnavigated, revealing new perspectives from every angle. The final Rotunda flips the “pedestal” blanket of the previous pieces and turns it into a sculpting medium proper. Textile Rotunda (Bell Tower) (1963) takes the shape of an unmistakably phallic tower of tufted and bedazzled textile in a deep eggplant hue. Its circular opening in the upper part, through which a chain connected to a bell hidden inside the tangle of links, is threaded—a pendant, like a necktie—suggesting as much a bell tower as a cartoonish Catholic clerical figure. Pinińska-Bereś was raised in a strict Catholic household; that influence is ever present.

The “Rotunda” series was succeeded by a series of “Сorset” sculptures, where both the Surrealist, the erotic, and the ambiguously feminist tendencies of her work come to full force. Of these, the Erect Corset of 1967 is especially captivating. Taking the shape of a standing figure, the work is supported by three pointed wooden legs, one of which sports a chain and a cuff—a broken-off shackle. The effect, vaguely menacing, is emphasized by the rough leather and the crude stitching of the two vertical slits either side of the breastplate—one closed shut by a criss-cross lattice of thread, one open, revealing a decidedly anatomical pink lining inside. If one were to circle around the figure, the back the top of the corset’s opening reveals a tangle of snaking, glossy black hair strands, glued-flat: the final element of repulsion and menace.

Installation view: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany, 2024–25. Courtesy Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst.

Of the many sculpture-cum-installations that succeeded the “Corset” series to become one of Pinińska-Bereś’s two choice expressive forms (alongside her performances), 1980’s Door presents a tempting metaphorical self-portrait. The work takes the shape of a white, slightly ajar door on top of which the artist’s name is written in pink using her signature calligraphic cursive. Bursting from behind and underneath the structure, mounds of pink padded fabric peek out here and there, as if barely contained by the rigid structure.

Throughout Pinińska-Bereś’s exhibition at GfZK, the sound of a kitchen whisk permeates the space. Its source is one of the few video documentations of her performances, as well as one of the latest works in the show. Titled Actions for Kitchen Utensils (1996), the video shows the artist in her sixties looking every inch the proper Eastern European middle-aged lady in small metal rimmed glasses, full-face makeup, and a fussy, flower-festooned hat. She is seen vigorously and fastidiously whipping a bowlful of egg whites with an old-fashioned spiral cone whisk, from time to time adding in pink food coloring—a scene straight out of a domestic-diva cooking show. Once the whites are sufficiently thickened to a soft meringue stage, the artist removes her hat and covers the table with a white tablecloth. She places the hat dead-center on the tablecloth, removes its flower corsage, and commences to carefully decorate the brim and crown with rosettes of freshly whipped whites. She pulls out a mirror and lipstick from her purse, adjusts her makeup, and then uses the lipstick to mark the tablecloth with the artist’s signature to punctuate the end of the performance.

Curatorial intention or not, this cooking show soundtrack felt like an especially apposite accompaniment for a lifetime of work that “reached out for the centuries-old female techniques” in order to steep their understanding in enigmatic ambiguity—as relevant today as it was half a century ago.

Valerie Mindlin is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Madrid.