Author: Agata Jakubowska
Publisher: MSN w Warszawie
Published: 2019
ISBN: 978-83-64177-59-0
Cover: softback
Pages: 332
Language: English

Zofia Kulik’s rich artistic career has a dual nature. Between 1970 and 1987, she worked alongside Przemysław Kwiek as a member of the duo KwieKulik, after which she began to develop a successful individual career. While KwieKulik’s work has been well established as central to the East European neo-avant-garde art lexicon of the 1970s and 1980s, Kulik’s solo work has yet to be examined in depth.

The first publication devoted solely to her work, this monograph analyzes the themes of her rich and complex oeuvre, addressing the (post)communist condition, artistic labor, intermediality, and the conditions of working as a female artist.

Kulik’s words that appear in the book’s title—‘Methodology, My Love’—come from an interview that Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted with the artist during his visit to her home in Łomianki near Warsaw in 1999. During their meeting, Kulik passionately explained to him different aspects of her complicated working methods, and concluded by admitting that: ‘I would like very much to make an exhibition entitled Methodology, My Love.’ Such a show has not yet been organized, but this book provides the opportunity to go beyond the attractive visuality of Kulik’s works. They are spectacular designs that fascinate viewers, who often remain unaware of what lies behind them: the enormous image archive, collections of various things, storage items (sometimes specially designed), but also long-elaborated and still-developing practices of transforming the assembly of single images into complex visual structures. (From the editor’s introduction.)