Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, known as Natalia LL, is a Polish artist. She paints, photographs, draws, performs, and creates video art. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2017, described her as "a neglected early-1970s Polish-born pioneer of feminist avant garde image making".
Biography
Natalia Lach-Lachowicz was born in Żywiec, Poland. From 1946 to 1956 Lach-Lachowicz lived in Bielsko-Biała where she completed basic and secondary education. From 1957 to 1963 she studied at the State College of Fine Arts in Wrocław under the supervision of Professor S. Dawski, where she completed her MSc. In 1964 she received a Diploma of the . In 1970 she co-founded PERMAFO, an artists' group and gallery, with Zbigniew Dłubak and Andrzej Lachowicz. In 1971, after marrying Lachowicz, she assumed the name Natalia LL. Since 1975 she has been engaged in the international feminist art movement and has taken part in various symposia and exhibitions. Between 2004 and 2013 she was a senior lecturer at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 2018, the was founded to preserve the works of Natalia LL as well as to provide a "place for exchanging scientific ideas and creative thoughts".
Work
Natalia LL is a conceptual artist and photographer, associated with the avant-garde scene of the 1960s in Poland. Through photography and video she deconstructs single-frame photographs and satirizes the images that were presented in advertising, television and print in the 1970s and 1980s. Her series, Consumer Art, depicts close ups of women eating and biting foods like bananas, sausages, and melons. It is often read as a critique, questioning the common representation of women in pornography. "Feminists saw in my consumer art a perverse struggle with the cult of the phallus and with masculinity. For me it was rather the manifestation of a feeling of life and liveliness." After suffering from a severe illness in the late 1970s, Natalia LL began to delve into transcendental and mythological subjects, often photographing her performances. In April 2019, after an anonymous complaint, the Polish National Museum in Warsaw removed from an exhibition works by Natalia LL, Katarzyna Kozyra, and the duo formed by Karolina Wiktor and Aleksandra Kubiak. This act, which was seen as an act of censorship of feminist art, led to widespread protests; a movement termed "#bananagate."
Natalia LL, Józef Robakowski, Ewa Juszkiewicz, gallery lokal_30 at Frieze New York City, 2016
Gender Check, Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, mumok Museum Moderner Kunst - Stiftung Ludwig Vienna & Zachęta National Gallery of Art Warsaw
Rebelle: Art and Feminism 1969-2009, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, Netherlands, 2009
Darkside - Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 2008
