Teresa Gierzyńska
About Her
Teresa Gierzyńska’s work is intimate and romantic, rarely provocative. In the series About her, she uses the formula of a self-portrait, treated in a peculiar way: as an opportunity to calmly reflect on oneself. She does not focus on the body, but tries to show a certain personal aura, the mood at a particular moment in time. She records small details of the surroundings accidentally unearthed in the photo. The artist takes photos of mirror images, carefully framing the selected fragment. Similarly, in the black and white photograph from the CCA collection, Gierzyńska is sitting wrapped in a towel on a deckchair; one can only glimpse a fragment of her torso, bare shoulders and an arm. The photograph is extremely sensual, subtle, and understated. The game of shadows hides or emphasizes elements in the frame.
The photographs from this series are in fact not only “about her”, or even “about a woman” – instead, they contain fragments of stories about us as human beings, about our emotions
Teresa Gierzyńska graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1971. She works with photography, techniques of its reproducing and processing. In her work, she uses family photo archives, creates collages using found photographs, postcards, and press photos. Her photographic series – About her, Travels, About light are a series of portraits and documentation of the work of her husband Edward and daughter Pola.