Abstract
This article examines the relationship between the legal non-recognition of women’s unpaid domestic and care work and its representation in Polish visual art from the end of the Second World War to the present. Combining legal analysis with art-historical inquiry, it argues that the invisibility of women’s labour is produced both through its exclusion from legal definitions of work and through cultural representations that have historically rendered such labour ordinary and unremarkable. The article analyses the concept of unpaid work in the Polish legal framework and discusses recent international developments, particularly within the International Labour Organization, aimed at increasing the recognition of care work. It then traces changing artistic representations of women’s labour through the works of Aleksander Kobzdej, Helena Korklińska-Żyrmont, Juliusz Studnicki, Andrzej Wróblewski, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Julita Wójcik, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka and Liliana Zeic, placing them within the broader context of international feminist art. The article demonstrates that while earlier artistic representations often reinforced traditional gender roles, contemporary art increasingly challenges the symbolic invisibility of women’s labour. It concludes that recognising unpaid work requires both legal reform and a broader cultural transformation of how work and social value are understood.