Teresa Tyszkiewicz

Teresa Tyszkiewicz  worked in performance, photography, painting and drawing, and created spatial objects and sculptures. She studied at the Warsaw University of Technology from 1974 to 1978. In 1975, she joined the circle of neo-avantgarde artists gathered around the Współczesna Gallery and later the Studio Gallery in Warsaw. In 1982, she and her husband, Zdzisław Sosnowski, found themselves in Paris (on their way back from an exhibition in Lisbon) and both decided to stay there. From 1985 on, they lived in the suburban town of Sucy-en-Brie. She died in Paris in 2020. She debuted in the late 1970s as an experimental filmmaker. She made her first films and photographs together with Zdzisław Sosnowski. Her individual film productions from the early 1980s are now counted among the iconic works of feminist art. In her photographs and films, she mostly used the expression of her own body. In the late 1970s, she began to experiment in her paintings with various unconventional materials, at which time pins appeared in her works, initially driven into paper and cardboard surfaces. In the 1980s, she produced a series of monumental paintings, usually using pins with which she studded canvases, papers, photographs, metal sheets and various objects. She also created spatial works, large spectacular forms and smaller objects, in which she often used various objects from her everyday surroundings. In the 1980s, she also continued to work in the field of performance, and in the following decades, a series of in-camera photographic recordings. Her creative activity went beyond the realm of the visual arts; from the mid-1980s onwards, she worked with the matter of words, recording her experiences and emotions in the form of poems. In the first half of the 1990s, she began her education in singing, graduating from the Sucy-en-Brie Conservatory and then in Paris and performing in public. She continued her creative activities until her death, producing further series of works, paintings, objects and photographs. In Paris, she collaborated with Galerie Ileana Bouboulis and Galerie Anne de Villepoix. Her art was absent from the Polish art scene for many years. The first major exhibition of her work in Poland was organised at Warsaw’s Zachęta in 1998. The Polish public was reminded of the artistic rank of her art by a retrospective exhibition at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 2020, opened a few months after the artist’s death. She worked with the Profile Foundation, which continues to be involved with her work.

The artist’s works can be found in museum collections and private collections, including Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; FNAC Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb; Mazovian Centre for Contemporary Art Elektrownia, Radom; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. National Museum in Warsaw, ; Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw; Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź; National Museum in Poznań; National Museum in Gdańsk; Zachęta Sztuki Współczesnej in Szczecin.