Aneta Grzeszykowska studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Working initially with photography and video, the artist appropriated these mediums to push them to their limits. With her political and critical approach to art making, across her career she has developed a multiform and radical style of self-portraiture. Her Love Book (2010) series has a methodological dimension: in this collection of photo collages, she literally inserts herself into a feminist art history, slipping her own image into works by artists such as Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). These women all died prematurely—one in mysterious circumstances, one by suicide and one by murder, and A. Grzeszykowska presents herself among them as witness to their talent as much as to the violence they endured.

Her body is at the heart of her investigations and allows her to delve ever further into questions of representation and the loss of self, of identity and its faults. She does not hesitate to disfigure her own image, as in the series Face Book (2019), which is interwoven with references to physiognomy and female hysteria, or Negative Blood (2017-2020), for which she created a photosensitive emulsion from her own blood and with it painted an organic, abstract self-portrait. Our self-image is partly founded on our relation to others, and A. Grzeszykowska reflects on this aspect of representation. In Album (2005) she manipulates her own family archives, removing herself from the photo albums to leave behind emptied images – a mother embracing the void before her, a man bathing alone – so that absence and distance are made the common thread of the family narrative. A. Grzeszykowska revisited this act in 2022, but this time it was her daughter Franciszka that disappeared, and her own maternal solitude unveiled.

Her child has more than once served as the artist’s model, permitting her to explore the nature of maternity with the same discordant, strange tenor that has characterised her work. She sews doll effigies of her daughter (Franciszka, 2014-2017), or offers Franciszka a realistic reproduction of her own chest to manipulate as she wishes (Mama, 2018), erecting an image of herself that she can then present to those around her. These offerings to loved ones become even more extreme in Selfie with the Dog (2023), in which she offers her own face to her dog to eat. The work is a performative continuation of Selfie, started in 2014, for which the artist rendered realistic reproductions of parts of her body in pigskin and then photographed them. A decade later, her face mask is devoured by her family pet, a self-image turned consumable sculpture. Black humour and the grotesque are integral to A. Grzeszykowska’s approach, which also seeks to prompt unease and disquiet. Confronting us as much with our own fragility as with our alienation, she enjoins us to think about the very status of images, be they our own or those that we project onto others.

A. Grzeszykowska’s work is internationally recognised. She was recently the subject of exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2022) and at the Francisco Carolinum museum in Linz (2020), and her works are held in the collections of museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.