Barbara Falender ”Erotic Pillow”, 1974, Carrara marble, 21 x 14 x 17 cm

Trajan’s Column, Michelangelo’s David, Queen Hedwig’s tombstone at Wawel Castle, Barbara Falender’s Erotic Pillows… White delicately veined marble has been mined in the Carrara quarry for two thousand years. It seems to radiate warmth as if still expending the energy of the sun and the organic rock. The six Erotic Pillows by Barbara Falender in the Studio Gallery collection are an exceptional body of work.

A student of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Falender went against the current. From the beginning she was interested in affirmation of the body and erotic pleasure. “It was a search for one’s own sensuality, one’s own organicity, it was a sculpting of one’s own experience”, the artist said in an interview with Wiesław Wierzchowska.

This is not a female act. It is a female act of desire. Falender’s art has been determined by this powerful and autonomous strength, so different from the forms of male desire that have been dominant in the culture so far. This has turned out to be subversive. During the socialist era, censorship interfered with the showing of these works. And today they have not lost anything of their novelty.

Dorota Jarecka