In this essay, Karolina Majewska-Güde explores the history of Galeria Adres, which the feminist Polish artist Ewa Partum launched in Łódź in 1972. Through unrivaled access and meticulous attention to the materials in the artist’s personal archive, Majewska-Güde reveals the role of this avant-garde gallery in fostering conceptual art with an international reach during the period of state socialism in Poland. The author is also a curator of the exhibition ewa partum: my gallery is an idea , realized in cooperation with Berenika Partum, which opened in Warsaw on March 7, 2019.
Polish-born artist Ewa Partum is considered a pioneer of Eastern European feminist art produced within the conceptual idiom. Her work belongs to two discursive formations: the historical neo-avant-garde that emerged during the 1960s and contemporary art with its temporal and semantic transition before and after 1989. Partum’s work can also be chronologically divided into Polish (1965–82), West Berlin (from 1982–89) and transnational/global (post-1989) periods. Undoubtedly, the relative visibility of Partum’s practice in Poland throughout the 1970s was due not only to her active engagement and participation in the existing artistic networks and events, but also to the creation of art infrastructure (Galeria Adres) and to her own flexibility as a cultural producer, which we can retrospectively define as artist as curator, artist as producer, and artist as publisher.
