Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) is regarded in Switzerland as a new discovery; in her native country, Poland, she has long since been famous as a pioneer. The Kunstmuseum Luzern is devoting a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to this feminist artist.

Pinińska-Bereś’s oeuvre includes sculptures, installations and performances that engage critically with gender roles and social structures. Her work is testimony to the experiences of an artist who liberated herself from social constraints and the patriarchal order during the Cold War. She broke with the conventions of her traditional training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and developed her own formal idiom, into which she integrated soft materials like foam. The colour pink became her distinctive feature. With it she was responding to the colour
red, omnipresent in Communism, while at the same time transporting her feminist message. Her sculptures are expansive, partly erotic, subtle, yet at the same time direct and full of irony.