Katarzyna Kozyra: Looking for Jesus

From the very beginning of Atlas Sztuki’s activities, we had planned an exhibition by Katarzyna Kozyra. Kozyra is one of Poland’s best-known artists and an important representative of critical art; her work is inseparably linked to the country’s new reality after 1989. She became widely known at the outset of her artistic career thanks to her 1993 graduation work, Pyramid of Animals. Unfortunately, the publicity generated by the media was largely negative. Her subsequent works—Blood Ties, Olympia, The Bathhouse, Men’s Bathhouse—addressed difficult social issues such as death, illness and encounters with nudity. They were widely discussed but often misunderstood and even censored, as in the case of two of the four photographs comprising Blood Ties. Katarzyna Kozyra was labelled a controversial artist who courted scandal.