born 1974 in Warsaw
Grzeszykowska graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1999. An author of photographs, objects and films, she often works in tandem with Jan Smaga – the couple is involved in photographic projects on architecture. Grzeszykowska’s individual works have been exhibited since 2015.
The artist deals with issues of individual identity, self-creation, and the defragmentation of body and memory. In her pieces she refers to works of other artists – Cindy Sherman, among others; she also draws inspiration from self-mythologies and childhood traumas. Grzeszykowska is eager to manipulate film and photographic mediums by creating fictional characters or by removing herself from private photos. The opposite of this strategy is the display of one’s own body in different variants. An important motif in Grzeszykowska’s works is absence, disappearance and confrontation with non-existence.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, Selfie #1, Selfie #7, Selfie #11, Selfie #14, Selfie #17, 2014, photographs
The cycle Selfie is a sculptural-photographic hybrid, a collection of fragments of the artist’s body formed of pigskin, and later photographed. The artist bursts the eponymous selfie category, depicting it in an unobvious and gruesome rendition. Grzeszykowska reformulates her image and unscrupulously subjects it to drastic procedures. Abstracted body parts have been photographed in close-ups that leave no room for building a distance. Magda Dorobińska commented on the photographs: “Fingers look like wriggling worms caught in the moment of agony, pinned down, dismembered. […] Aneta Grzeszykowska once again toys with our visual habits, eyesight formatting consolidated by crime films, photographs and TV series.”
