The catalog accompanying the exhibition entitled Natalia LL. Sum ergo sum, presented from May 19 to October 1, 2017 at the Center for Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń, is a special and important publication for several reasons. First of all, it is a publication illustrating, in its iconographic layer, documentation from the largest presentation of Natalia LL's work in her long artistic career. The exhibition, which - in concept and realization by perhaps the youngest curator in Poland, Mateusz Kozieradzki - with a sense of balanced proportions of the selection of works and narration of the entire exhibition, has a retrospective character and is a successful attempt to organize and summarize nearly 60 years of the artist's oeuvre - starting with works from the early 1960s and ending with the most recent realizations, dating back to 2016. An equally important part of the catalog, are the texts published in it by Polish and foreign (Great Britain, Germany and former Yugoslavia) historians, art critics and philosophers. Richard Demarco, JešaDenegri and art critic GislindNabakowski - were (and are) witnesses to the development of Natalia LL's creative path, as well as her friends and organizers of the presence of the Polish artist's art, especially before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, at presentations and exhibitions in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Their essays, along with scholarly studies by Wojciech Szymanski, Mateusz Kozieradzki and Malina Barcikowska, expand the existing knowledge of one of the most important Polish artists of the second half of the 20th century, despite the fact that, as Wojciech Szymanski aptly notes in his study, "it might seem that everything or almost everything has already been said about her. After all, the list of important and ambitious exhibitions and the critical and theoretical texts written around them [concerning Natalia LL's work - JWS note], only those from recent years, is long and abounds in sensational new readings and recognitions."
CURATOR
Mateusz Kozierdzki
