For her most recent solo exhibition, Zuzanna Szary chose to build the show around the figure and oeuvre of Gertrude Stein. In Tender Buttons at BWA Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski (2025)—for that is the exhibition in question—even the title was a quotation from the American writer’s work. The artist was primarily interested in the intimate and sensual experience of the domestic life of two women, in which everyday situations, ordinary objects, and the interiors of their home served as the scenography for a lesbian, erotic, and transhistorical masquerade.
Zuzanna Szary’s new exhibition at Galeria UFO is an expansion of Tender Buttons and a logical continuation of the themes and motifs the artist has explored so far—its second chapter, one might say. This time, however, the figure who inspired the artist is Gertrude Stein’s life partner, Alice B. Toklas, author of the famous The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. It is precisely this work that Zuzanna Szary has drawn upon in creating an ambiguous and unsettling new cycle of paintings depicting animals, food, and abundance. The Cookbook of Zuzanna M. Szary, much like its literary prototype and equivalent, thus becomes a laboratory of lesbian culinary sensibility, employing the cookbook genre—transposed onto the still life—as a convenient narrative device for delineating queer, alternative forms of sociality, family, and love.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue of the artist’s works, featuring texts by Renata Lis and Dorota Kotas as well as a transcribed conversation with Zuzanna Szary. The book launch will take place during the run of the exhibition.
Wojciech Szymański
Polish 
English