Collection

The "Bust" is one of the very few preserved objects from a most significant and intense period in the artistic work of Teresa Murak, in the mid-1970s, where she developed her own original language of artistic expression. At the time, in her art the artist would allude to urban and suburban landscapes, relationships between nature and the human body and responsibility for the ecosystem (especially in its less spectacular forms, like mud, dust or weed, etc.), as well as to the spectrum of faith, referring to both pagan and Judaeo-Christian foundations. The "Bust" constitutes Murak’s artistic attempt to stop time. The sculpture, made of fabric and cress and preserved in plexiglas (which required countless tests with the material, cooperation with a chemical laboratory, etc.), makes a surreal object alluding to the growth and dying of the human body and to the ossifying power of art and museum institutions. The "Bust" was exposed during significant exhibitions of contemporary art including the one entitled "The Figure in Polish Sculpture of the 19th and the 20th century" at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (1999). It is a rare work of art with high museum quality, which belongs to objects in which Murak intertwines the tradition of art characterized by ecological provenance with spiritual reflection and feminist threads.