Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972, photography © Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
IN MEMORIAM | Natalia LL (Natalia Lach-Lachowicz)
On 12 August 2022, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, better known as Natalia LL, as she signed her work since 1971, died at the age of eighty-five.
Natalia LL was a conceptual artist and part of the avant-garde scene of the 1960s in Poland. Her practice included photography and video, and her pioneering works in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were an ironic critique of consumerism, advertising, and the presentation of women as subordinate subjects in pornography.
Often brash and provocative, Natalia LL’s art was on frequently subject to censorship, either owing to the social mores of the time, as early in her career, or to a repressive government, as seen in 2019, when removal of a Natalia LL work from Warsaw’s National Museum sparked protests nationwide.
Natalia LL was born Natalia Lach in Żywiec, Poland, in 1937, and in 1963, she earned a diploma from the Association of Polish Art Photographers in Wroclaw.
In 1970 she co-founded PERMAFO, an artists’ group and gallery, with Zbigniew Dłubak and Andrzej Lachowicz. In 1971, after marrying Lachowicz, she assumed the name Natalia LL. Since 1975 she was engaged in the international feminist art movement and took part in various symposia and exhibitions.
Moderna galerija has several Natalia LL’s works in the Arteast 2000+ collection: the photograph Consumer Art, 1972, is part of an eponymous series of close-ups of women eating or biting on foods like bananas, sausages, and melons. As the artist commented on it: “Feminists saw in my Consumer Art a perverse struggle with the cult of the phallus and with masculinity. For me it was rather the manifestation of a feeling of life and liveliness.” After suffering a severe illness in the late 1970s, Natalia LL turned to transcendental and mythological subjects, often photographing her performances. A work of this kind is Pyramid, 1979, also in the Arteast 2000+ collection, and currently on view at the exhibition Emergency Exit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. This performance was situated within Natalia LL’s research on intuitive cognition and internal human structure revealed in the course of the creative process.
