Lee Cluderay, b. Marjorie Powell, 1900, Port Glasgow, Scotland. Began working as an artist – principally a collagiste – in Paris in 1921 under the name Lee Cluderay. An important muse to the Surrealists (particularly André Breton, with whom she had a brief affair), she moved London in 1936 and began to experiment with film. Thought to have been working on a semi-fictitious documentary about her life, Exits Exist, when she died, aged 37, in a fire at her studio set deliberately by her lover Tiva Miller (wife of the Conservative MP Edgar Miller). Mrs Miller was later sentenced to life imprisonment. What survives of Cluderay’s film footage is held in the archives of the British Film Institute in London. Many of her collages were destroyed in the fire. The works on display here are all that survive.
Joe Cornell, b. 24 December 1930, New York, known primarily as a sculptor, collagist, and illustrator of children's books. An avid filmgoer throughout his life, in the 1960s he made a series of experimental films dedicated to movie stars of the silent era. Towards the end of his life he began a series of photographic works based on his experience of life in New York City. These works remained largely unknown until after his death in 1997. They have never been exhibited.
Leina N., born. c. 1942, Moscow, worked as a photographer and artist in Tiblisi, Georgia, c. 1985–1995. Little is know about her early life. In the late 1960s she was registered as living with a family in Tiblisi, Georgia (not her own), and is thought to have become involved in the Georgian Dissidential movement. It was during this time that she began to take photographs. She also made photo-collages influenced by Russian constructivists and German Dada artists. From 1978 worked as a technician at Tiblisi Republican Hospital developing X-ray film. After independence in 1991 began to work as a street photographer, often seen in Mziuru Park, Tiblisi. Since 1996 her whereabouts are unknown.
The photo-collages exhibited here were discovered recently in a flea market in Tiblisi by a woman who had been photographed by Leina as a child. The curators wish to thank Anna Kuzanov for her research.
Szara Kamienica Gallery, Rynek Główny 6
open: 14.05–12.06: TUE–FRI: 13:00–18:00, SAT, SUN: 11:00–17:00