Liliana Piskorska Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1988 -

Liliana Piskorska is a multidisciplinary artist who is involved in drawing, photography, and creating objects, performances, and videos. She was born on 17th December 1988 in Torun.

She attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. In 2011 she transferred to the University of Warsaw for one year. In 2017 she defended her Ph.D. at the Faculty of Drawing at her home university under the academic supervision of Elzbieta Jablonska. Since 2013 she has been a member of Grupa nad Wisla. In 2010 she received the Talens Company Award at the 3rd Polish Drawing Exhibition in Torun; a year later, at the next edition, she also earned an honourable mention. In 2017 she won the Visible White Photo Award granted by the Fondazione Studio Marangoni Firenze in Florence.

On her website she writes that she grew up in the countryside, is a baptised atheist, a vegan because of moral issues, and a nonheteronormative lesbian. This is why one can find feminist, anarchist, and posthumanist motifs in her art. Some of the topics that she touches on are identity, corporeality, animalism and the relationships of power. She also brings up current social issues. A common property of them is the critical and subversive affirmation of that which is outside of the norm.

One of her first works was the installation Dead Animals (2011-12). The artist built a narrow space and covered it with the furs of rabbits, foxes, chinchillas, sheep, and coypu. She also used natural animal hair and skin in her sculpture Bitches: Self-portrait with a Lover (2013), covering her own body and the body of her partner with them. This piece can be perceived, as the artist suggests, as a story about animalistic lust, symbiosis, and womanhood, and also as an attempt to eliminate the negative connotations associated with the word ‘bestiality’. Piskorska works with furs which were discarded, unused, or old, while at the same time she criticises the industry for the sake of which animals are being killed.
Selected works by Liliana Piskorska – Image Gallery

During the two-month-long act All the Beautiful Girls and All the Beautiful Boys, conducted in 2013 at the Wozownia Gallery in Torun, the artist created objects from human remains. In the exhibition space she arranged a depilatory room that anybody could visit. Later, in a similar manner, she acquired material for the bas-relief Decorations (2014) – a series of objects covered with depilatory wax.

In 2013, Piskorska, together with Martyna Tokarska, took a trip around Poland. Disguised in wedding dresses, they photographed themselves in the urban space. As a result, photo documentation and the film A Journey were created, in which they recorded conversations with passers-by about the restricted rights of homosexual people. They wrote of their project: ‘It’s a nonheterosexual story about the affirmation of love, a story about the need to have equal rights’. They have shown the film in Poznan, Torun, Kraków, Bydgoszcz, and in the El Art Gallery Centre in Elblag, where, after the mayor’s intervention, the exhibition was closed just a few days after the opening. As the artist commented in an interview conducted for Gazeta Wyborcza:

Before Elblag there was controversy in Torun as well, where a discussion to summarise our project was held. A few days before the planned meeting a group of people in balaclavas smashed window panes using stones in a private gallery, screamed homophobic slogans, threatened to set the building on fire, and to return on the day of the discussion.