Natalia LL
1937–2022 · Polish conceptual artist and pioneer of feminist art
Natalia LL, born Natalia Lach-Lachowicz in Żywiec in 1937 and died in 2022, was a Polish conceptual artist who worked with painting, photography, drawing, performance and video art. She is considered an early pioneer of feminist avant-garde image making in the early 1970s, and her work questions the common representation of women.
She studied in Wrocław between 1957 and 1963 and began taking photographs in 1960, in an introductory course. By the late 1960s she had turned toward conceptualism after experimenting with so-called "facial geography" photographs, enlarged fragments of faces. In 1970 she co-founded the group and gallery Permafo in Wrocław with Zbigniew Dłubak, Andrzej Lachowicz and Antoni Dzieduszycki. It operated until 1981 and was a key link in Polish art photography.
Her best-known series, Consumer Art (1972-1975), shows women eating bananas, sausages or gelatin, and is often read as a critique of the common representation of women in pornography. In 2019 the National Museum in Warsaw removed this series from an exhibition, a decision that provoked widespread protests. From 2004 she taught at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. The ZW Foundation, created in 2018, works to preserve her art.