Aneta Grzeszykowska

About Aneta Grzeszykowska

Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska (*1974) is posing fundamental questions about identity and what constitutes the self. For this purpose, she uses her own body in performative transmutations and stagings, which she documents in photo spreads, films and books. Her basic artistic material is her own physicality and tightly interrelated subjects such as nudity and disguise, beauty, vulnerability, and transience.

Aneta Grzeszykowska uses both digital and analogue photography and collage, placing a lot of emphasis on the technical perfection of her black and white pictures, which she prints herself in the darkroom. Notwithstanding their photographic brilliance, her photos thrive on their power of narration and their intensity in dealing with existential states – yet she frames her visual worlds as a visual reality, which make its own tempting claim to truth.

For this reason, she takes on different roles. She works with dresses and masks, with make-up and body painting. The transition from life to death and from real to unreal is all one in her deceptively real reproductions of body parts such as belly, finger, vagina and face, or even her doppelganger, reduced to a head and torso. Aneta Grzeszykowska is fascinated with skin and leather as she is with the idea of using bodily surfaces as a canvas for projections and manipulations, which is being inscribed with desire and joy, or terror and discomfort.