Photo By Gail

In The Alchemist (2015) artist Paulina Olowska (b. 1976) restages one of the many erotic Polaroid photographs taken by Italian architect, Carlo Mollino. The artist portrays himself in period clothing, and in a playfully provocative pose. She adopts in imagined persona to subvert representations of women as images of heterosexual male desire. In the background, she has woven together mushroom imagery and depictions of her sketches, gesturing toward her rich inner world.

Photographed in the Tate Modern Museum in London.