Teresa Murak (born 1949)
Teresa Murak (born 1949) one of the most important Polish female artists and precursors of performance art, land art and feminist art. She works with landscape using natural materials: germinating seeds creating their own organic architecture, growing bread leaven, clay, river sludge. The key for her is the place, body, time, life cycle energy, leading from the sensual dimension to the spiritual and religious planes. The personal, bodily scale develops by building relations with others, the organic growth of the community “with openness to all reciprocity”. The artist studied art history at the Catholic University of Lublin and then at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her works were completed in many places in the form of both one-off and long-lasting activities, becoming a large scale landscape feature, such as the “Sculpture for Earth”, Hoffmann Collection, Berlin (1996), “Sun Rises from Earth”, the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (1994). Murak’s solo exhibitions were presented at the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf (2013), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (1998), Galeria Bielska BWA (1998), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (1992). She is a Katarzyna Kobro Prize laureate (2005).
