Kuryluk's first installation was made of cheap lining cloth in white, pink and black covered with life-size drawings of the artist and her companion, showing a young couple, their morning on white, their day on pink, their night on black cloth, constituting together a textile room. Eager to play on words and the contrast between totalitarian architecture and private space, the artist titled her installation at the Eastern Wall Gallery (opposite the
Palace of Culture,
Stalin's "gift" to Warsaw) "In the Four Walls". It opened on 1 March 1979, creating a splash and barely escaping
censorship. Her next Warsaw installation was the first in red and white, executed with rusty felt-pen and red and white paint on unbleached cotton, reminiscent of skin. In the spring of 1981 Kuryluk was invited to International Biennale in
Medellín, Colombia, an enormous event with thousands of artists participating, though she was the only one from the
Soviet bloc. After having painted her cubicle black, she hung her cotton "skins" with naked body parts cut, sewn and burnt, on washing lines. The installation mirrored family drama but it was perceived as reflective of the situation in Poland, with Solidarity facing a crackdown, and in reference to human rights abuse in Latin America. Shortly after the opening,
Pope John Paul was shot in
Rome, his white dress splashed with blood. Suddenly, the artist's cubicle attracted such crowds that military police were posted to guard her "skins". This was also the beginning of her career in the United States. Impressed with the installation, Helen Shlien invited her to
Boston. "Room of Memories", made of "bloodied" cotton walls and shrouds draped on the floor and on chairs, was presented through January 1982 at the Helen Shlien Gallery in Boston, and in December it was chosen the best exhibit of the year by "
The Boston Globe". In September 1982 "Interrogation", twelve chairs draped with naked self-portraits, were shown at 12th International Sculpture Conference in
San Francisco, and later recreated for "Villa dei Misteri" at Art in General, "Textile Sculpture" at the
Musée des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, and "Membranes of Memory", her solo show in
Buenos Aires. "Theater of Love", her second Boston installation was supported by the
National Endowment for the Arts. The monumental cloth hall, her largest work to date, was made of cotton walls and columns suspended from the ceiling and bed sheets on the floor with depictions of a couple making love, their bodies larger than life and private parts showing prominently. There was a smell of scandal and Thomas Frick, reviewing the show for "
Art in America", pointed out that exact rendition of private eroticism always borders on the political. While working on her first novel, Kuryluk developed the idea of "Drawritings" by adding script to drawing, and blue to red. "The Dreaming Head", a broken plaster cast covered with texts and placed on a pillow, was used as the cover illustration of her novel, "Century 21". "My Feet", a cotton path with imprints of her foot steps, the left in red expressing her female self, the right in blue acting as her male ego, "talked" to each other while "walking" to the sea on the coral sand beach in
Key West. Kuryluk's first American outdoor installations opened in 1982 in New York's
Upper West Side. The 1984–5 Hodder Fellowship at
Princeton University gave her opportunity to live outside a big city for the first time. Taken with the campus and the landscape, she made full use of the scenery changing in seasons and documented her installations in hundreds of photographs, some of which were reproduced by
Joyce Carol Oates in her "Ontario Review". The 1988–9
Rockefeller Fellowship at
National Humanities Center in
North Carolina gave her another opportunity of working in outdoors. She was also commissioned by her class to produce a joint indoor installation with the poet
Rita Dove, and designed a composition of two cotton scrolls, the vertical with drawings in red, the horizontal with a poem by Dove written in blue. Kuryluk was awarded a grant from the New York Asian Cultural Council in 1991 in recognition of her contribution to the understanding of the mythology of
Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, included in her "Veronica" study. The trip to Japan opened a world for her, and she returned many times, with exhibitions and lectures. Her Japanese outdoor silk installations differed from the cotton ones. Permeated with desire to restore lost harmony between humanity and nature, they were reflective of her affinity to
Zen minimalism and
Shinto traditions. When hanging from blooming cherry trees in the
Imperial Garden in
Kyoto, white silk veils seemed to vanish in the air, while the yellow silk cut outs of her brother as small boy shimmered between stone foxes in the
Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine in remembrance of his love for animals. When her retrospective in cameo was shown in
Fukuoka, a visitor said to the artist: "You must have been Japanese in your former life". In 2001 Kuryluk shifted to Yellow Installations, a more historical type of work based on childhood recollections, inspired by her mother's hallucinations of yellow birds and yellow snow, symbolic of the mass of Jews with yellow bands and stars destroyed during the
Holocaust. She discovered that her Jewish grandparents and other relatives had been among them only after her mother's death when she found letters and photographs stashed away in old winter shoes. She also found her own juvenile work, some of it dealing with the Holocaust, lovingly preserved by her mother and today in the
Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. == Photography ==