In her complex works, the Polish artist manipulates images of male nudes to comment on masculine power-plays and female emancipation

To give people a sense of her evolution, the lauded Polish artist Zofia Kulik likes to compare two of her creative milestones. The first was the centrepiece of her earliest exhibition as a solo artist in 1989, where she debuted her groundbreaking, technically complex photomontages in which dizzying patterns are woven from repeating imagery. It’s a self-portrait where she peers uncertainly from a mandala made from tiny posturing male nudes, “pressed in by men” as Kulik puts it.

The second was made nearly a decade later in 1997, the year that that artistic leap into the unknown was given the ultimate public affirmation and she represented her country at the Venice Biennale. This time she’s an assertive queen, posed like Elizabeth I, resplendent with a ruff, wide-skirted and sleeved gown, embellished with decorative patterns of those naked men.