Natalia LL Consumer Art
Natalia LL (Lach-Lachowicz, 1937) belongs to the first generation of conceptual artists in Poland. She has been supporting the international feminist art movement since 1975 by participating in numerous symposia and exhibitions. Her work covers photography, painting, drawing, performance and video. Natalia LL‘s installations, photography and performance have been exhibited in some of most prestigious exhibitions and biennials wordwide.
The brot.undspiele gallery presents a cycle of Natalia LL‘s series „Consumer Art“, that have been very much discussed in the 1970s. The photos do provoke by showing a young, blond woman eating a banana. The erotic allusion in the apparently „innocent” motive is seduction and trap at the same time.
„Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, who calls herself Natalia LL, is the most important and internationally well-known polish female artist. Already in the seventies pictures of her „Consumer Art“ filled the pages of international art-magazines; her photoseries of a young blond woman eating suggestively and ambiguously a banana excited the minds in 1975 at the 9th Biennal of Young Art in Paris.
Natalia LL‘s „Consumer Art” seemed to combine any kind of carnal desires in a free and easy manner. Also a further series of photographic pictures – „Dreamings“ – that show herself dressed in white veils, drowsy and dreaming, combined erotic allusions with romantic ideas and thus continued the chosen direction.”
In: Natalia LL – Der transzendentale Blick | Catalogue | Muzeum Narodowe Wroclaw 1994 | Reinhold Misselbeck | Köln
„She uses the face as a systems of signs. By means of the camera placed directly in front of the sitter, she seizes the hysiognomic variations recorded in a temporal sequence underlying the different moments of expressiveness. Rather than plotting psychology, these sequences exhibit the surface and threshold, which transmute the body into a sign.”
Achille Bonito Oliva | Europe/America – the different avant-gardes | Milano: Deco Press | 1976