On International Women’s Day on 8 March, four galleries in Kazimierz – Off Frame, UFO Art Gallery, Jak zapomnieć and Nuremberg House – host an unusual international project Ciałaczki. Women from Poland, Spain, Germany and Austria present their artworks focusing on the female body and its meaning and significance in culture, social life and public space. For many centuries, the aesthetic and cultural ideals of women were defined and shaped by men following their perspectives and rules. The exhibitions and accompanying workshops explore how women perceive themselves through interpretations of many authors and curators representing a wide range of cultural and social traditions.
The presented series of works concerns the author's private life and proves that nobody is free from imperfections and uncertainty. The artist uses art as a way to emphasize her fear, and she defines the creation process as an act of absorbing emotions. In her works, reflec-tions focus on the body as an object of artistic activity, at the level of creative physical trans-gression, circulating in search of answers to questions about the boundaries of body image and artistic freedom in the context of contemporary culture. The artist's main focus is the body as an experimental zone, the influence of power, the notion of property undergoing constant change, and places where one can define one's own subjectivity. Her art releases again the visual sphere and the concept of art, beauty and aesthetics. The function of art should be interpreted here as a manifestation of what is not obvious, what is "subcuta-neous", vague and marginal. The artist's search is based on the study of women's intimacy and the extremes of intimate transgression, through interpretative and psychoanalytical re-search, philosophy and the broadly understood humanities of our time.
Agata Stępień – born in Krakow in 1986. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, from where she embarked on an artistic journey through Europe. She earned a master's degree in art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (she received a diploma in painting with honors), then resided in Barcelona and completed her doctoral studies with the title of international doctor of art at two universities: Universidad de Castilla La Mancha in Spain and Universidad de Belas Artes Lisboa in Portugal .
Currently lives in Krakow. In 2017/2018 she conducted lectures in two languages on the subject of her own work, on following topics: „The introductory topics in vision of gender phenomena’’, and „Transgression in art. Cultural Dynamic” at the Faculty of Humanities of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow. She was invited to deliver frequent speeches at the European universities (including the Women's Leadership Symposium in Oxford). She is a member of the Indevol International Research Group and the Euro-Mediterranean Women's Foundation in Barcelona. She is fluent in four languages. Her research focuses on female artistic perception and is based on interest in intimacy and the female body.
