Dorota Nieznalska

Sculptor, photographer, video artist and installation artist. Born in 1973 in Gdańsk.

Dorota Nieznalska studied sculpture from 1992 under Professor Franciszek Duszeńko and multimedia under Professor Grzegorz Klaman at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. She graduated in 1999. Between 1998 and 2000 she collaborated with Gdańsk’s Galeria Wyspa and Fundacja Wyspa Progress. She creates installations, sculptures, photographs, videos and video installations, and lives and works in Gdańsk.

Nieznalska is one of the few Polish artists whose work tackles the difficult issues of a culture strongly rooted in the Catholic tradition and the myths surrounding it, as well as issues of modern identity, stereotypical roles and models of masculinity. Her early installations from her student days already featured fetish objects associated with the oppression inherent in certain spheres of human activity (such as Entering Into the Possession of a Mystery (1998) and Absolution (1999)). During the same period she created a series of photographs of a bitch and her owner, reflecting a relationship based on violence and submission through waist-down images of the naked man, and the bitch cringing at the sight of a leather belt (1999).