| | | | | | | | Aneta Grzeszykowska: Selfie #19, 2014
Pigment ink on paper, 27 x 36 cm
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw | | | | | | FAMILY SKIN | | | | 28 October 2020 – 28 February 2021 | | | | | | Francisco Carolinum Linz Museumstr. 14, A-4010 Linz
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| | | | | | | | | Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mama #32, 2018
Pigment ink on paper, 50 x 36 cm
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw | | | | | | For more than 15 years, Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska (*1974) has been reflecting on fundamental questions of identity and self-understanding in her works. Her subject of focus is the human body, particularly that of women, in its role as a projection screen and construction. Family Skin addresses the wide range of methods, products, creams, gels, masks, massages and plastic surgery procedures for enhancing, perfecting and self-optimising the skin. The exhibition is set against the backdrop of this furious obsession with beauty and eternal youth.
By means of photography and sculpture, Aneta Grzeszykowska focuses on the construction of a physical aesthetic as an ideal image, also by opposing it with the signs of old age and disfiguration. She works with photographic and collage techniques, both digital and analogue.
These include, in particular, the rituals and mise-en-scène of beauty and self-expression that have become firmly established within social media as collective norms. Aneta Grzeszykowska deliberately experiments with these clichés in some of her series. Selfie (2014) and Face Book (2020) clearly allude to this with their titles. She provokes the question of what fragments of the self remain underneath the photographic surface, the shell and skin of the physical. To this end, she deploys her own body in performative transformations and stagings, which she documents in photo series, films and book objects. She takes on different roles. She works with clothing and masks, make-up, foundation and body paint. | | | | | | | | | Aneta Grzeszykowska: Face Book (Angry Face), 2020
Silver gelatine hand print, 50 x 66 cm framed
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw | | | | | | The exhibition is presenting selected works of various series dating from 2006 until the present. Examples will be shown of Untitled Film Stills (2006), which refers to the group of works of the same name by the American artist Cindy Sherman from the late 1970s. For Selfie (2014), individual body parts made of pig skin are reproduced, painted and made up. The artist plays with the narrative potential of photography, the pleasing horror and fascination of a narrative motif reminiscent of the novel character Viktor Frankenstein and his attempt to artificially create a human being, In Beauty Mask (2017), she stages herself in absurd, commercially available beauty masks. Face Book (2020) is in the tradition of extreme deformations and grimaces of the facial features, reminiscent of the heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783).
With the series Mama (2018), she expanded the field of her investigations to include the relationship between mother and child and shifts familiar structures when the daughter plays with a replica, a doll, or her mother. This series also gives free rein to the assumptions and fears triggered by the photographs. The imagination creates the notion of a murder, a corpse and a truly horrific event.
Aneta Grzeszykowska lives and works in Warsaw. With "FAMILY SKIN", the Francisco Carolinum in Linz is presenting the first museum exhibition of her fascinating work outside Poland. | | | | | | | | | Aneta Grzeszykowska: Mama #50, 2018
Pigment ink on paper, 50 x 36 cm
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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© 23 Oct 2020 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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Editor: Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
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