Aneta Grzeszykowska was born in Warsaw in 1974. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts at Warsaw’s Faculty of Graphics. There she met Jan Smaga, with whom she would form an artistic duo in 1999, the year they both graduated.
Despite being part of a duo, Grzeszykowska is celebrated for her singular artistic voice. A talented orchestrator of manipulated images, the artist reformulates fundamental questions debated in art history for many years, by balancing the personal and the universal. In articulating photography as a method of capture with performance-adjacent mise-en-scène, Grzeszykowska offers her take on self-creation as an artistic process. However, while initial manifestations of these questions in the 1950s, 60s and 70s mythologised the self under a traditional existential lens, Grzeszykowska’s approach embraces the post-media society she lives in and its mutated existentialism.
Using fragmented photographs of her body and anthropomorphic surrogates or artefacts such as pigskin masks and body parts, she investigates familiar ontological themes of absence, invisibility, disappearance, erasure, impersonation and dismemberment. In doing so, she brings up to date the anthropological questions raised by Hans Belting regarding identity and performance (whether the cultivated persona or the imposed stereotype), presence and representation. By adopting a highly stylised aesthetic, she establishes a distance that circumvents self-referentiality and strives for the universal.
