Maria Pinińska-Bereś

Polish sculptor and performance artist Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931-1999) played an active role in shaping the artistic community of Kraków. Her sculptures initially followed the modernist trend popular among Polish artists during the Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization in the late 1950s. She gradually transformed her style and developed her own unique aesthetic in the mid-1960s, this is seen in Lady with a Bird (1964), in which she added small quilted blankets to concrete sculptures. Later, this aesthetic incorporated new materials such as paper maché, linen, burlap, leather, and plywood, and primarily used white, pink, and yellow tones, evident in her Corset and Psycho-Small-Furniture series created in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pinińska-Bereś began exploring femininity and the various cultural oppressions experienced by women in the mid-1960s, these insights and experiences were then translated and embedded into her practice. Her art then predominantly featured pink, soft, stuffed cotton forms, as seen in her work Sea Foam-Arisen (1977), which remained consistent throughout her life.