Timothy Persons

The first large-scale English language retrospective of one of Poland’s leading contemporary artists, arriving at a transformative moment in her career. Zofia Kulik’s photographs are a psychic collage of the self. Inspired by eroticism, feminism, and the political and social developments of post-war Poland, her expansive work offers a radical critique of not only what it means to be an artist and a woman, but of what it means to be human. Featuring her most pivotal series – including The Splendor of Myself – this expansive publication charts her rich and varied career, journeying from her earlier collaborations as KwieKulik to the development of her solo work. Shortly after graduating from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, Kulik formed the artistic duo KwieKulik with her then partner Przemyslaw Kwiek. Running the Studio of Documentation and Propagation Activities (PDDiU) from their home in Warsaw, the pair created avant-garde films, photographs and objects, as well as performances, installations and interventionist texts. After splitting in 1987, Kulik expressed a new-found desire for her work to be present in museums and institutions. Subsequently developing the black-and-white photomontages for which she is now most famous, Kulik would combine complex patterns with often hundreds of images. Painstakingly detailed and often physically imposing, these images reflect an artist committed to exploring the murky terrains of the psyche. Bringing together these pivotal works alongside Kulik’s lesser-known but no less radical projects, this book features comprehensive yet accessible texts from leading writers to provide a much needed introduction to one of Poland’s most important living artists.

No one uses the camera like the photographer Niko Luoma. He is not interested in capturing the world in front of his lens. He uses light to create his own visual spheres. Using up to a thousand multiple exposures he applies individual elements of color and form to the negative, layer by layer. Meticulous calculations and geometrical skills are the necessary foundation for this. The results are abstract photographs of impressive, colorful intensity and luminosity. This book of photos is based on the series Adaptions, which reproduces famous works by other artists. Luoma presents a fascinating visual game in which the independent charisma of the photographs acts in concert with its reverence toward Bacon, Hockney, Van Gogh, or Picasso. With tongue in cheek, Luoma thus realizes the avant-garde’s desire to liberate photography from reproducing reality, allowing it to become an art.

Eeva Karhun kerrokselliset valokuvat käsittelevät ajan kulkua ja syklisyyttä. Ajan taltioimisen metodina hän käyttää päällekkäisvalotusta. Havainnon ja kognition pohtiminen on hänen taiteessaan tärkeä lähtökohta. Silmä tai muisti eivät toimi kuin kamera, joka tallentaa kaiken yhtä merkityksellisenä, vaan tunnetilat ja aistimukset värittävät näköhermojen välittämää kokemusta. Eeva Karhun teoksia on nähty useissa yksityisnäyttelyissä paitsi Suomessa myös Berliinissä, Lontoossa, Pariisissa ja Tukholmassa. Polku on ensimmäinen kirjamuotoinen esittely Karhun taiteesta. Through the layered structure of her photographs, Eeva Karhu reflects on time and its cyclic nature, using multiple exposures as her technique for recording time's passage. Her art engages in the study of perception and cognition. The human eye and memory are not like a camera, which records everything unselectively, because the experiences relayed by our visual receptors are always coloured by our emotions and other sensory impressions. Karhu has held numerous solo exhibitions in Finland as well as in Berlin, London, Paris and Stockholm. Path is the first book-form presentation of her art.

The Nature of Being is the sixth volume from the series of books about the Helsinki School. It concentrates on bringing together the various approaches used by the School’s representatives to conceptualize nature visibly. The stated goal is not to limit oneself to purely physical depictions of animals, plants, and landscapes. Nature ought to be expressed through a different type of unit and with a new way of gauging time. Days, months, and seasons become the points of crystallization for time. Thus, the photographs reflect a Nordic sense about feelings of loneliness, jealousy, or desire. The works provide photographic insight into the complex horizon of emotions that characterize our individual views of nature. They do not portray landscape as such, but the world in which we live.