ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA- meeting with the artist

At the meeting in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Aneta Grzeszykowska talked about her artistic practice focusing particularly on works presented at the exhibition "&". The exhibition that was on show in Muzeum’s location on Więckowskiego Street took us into the abyss of creation and aesthetic experience; it was an invitation to the world built of mazes, déjà vu, subtle similarities, strange symmetries, and unexpected discoveries.

Meeting with the artist was e an excellent occasion to see her works from the angle that she herself considers the most fascinating, i.e., as a process of creating artworks. Photography and film, the media most often used by Grzeszykowska, give the artist full control over the final outcome. She exercises it by presenting the audience with photos of spatial works placing the viewer in the position chosen by herself. Grzeszykowska uses her selected medium instrumentally, treating it as a tool used to deliver more advanced artistic and ontological exercises. The artist is interested in the role of photography in creating and documenting human identity. In her film projects human figure becomes a puppet, similarly to her sculptures/dolls. One of the main themes of Grzeszykowska’s art is her own identity, which she analyses and with which she “plays” at multiple levels: when deleting her own image from the family album (Album, 2005) or by impersonating the character of Cindy Sherman (Untitled Film Stills, 2006). In some of her projects, like in the series of portraits of nonexistent people (Untitled, 2006), Grzeszykowska uses the possibilities offered by digital image manipulation, on other occasions she uses photograph and film classically, putting emphasis on performative dimension of artistic creation. Motifs that almost obsessively come back in Grzeszykowska’s art are, inter alia, absence, invisibility, disappearing and juxtaposing the body and mind with non-existence. “I sometimes thought that cutting off my own finger and watch it decompose would be an interesting experience”, says the artist who describes the  body, identity and a human being as a never ending process.

Three video films presented at exhibition "&": Black (2007), Bolimorfia (2008-2010), and Headache (2008) showed slow disintegration of a human figure and the infinity of space. We could see the artist against a black background getting dressed in black clothes. Her body disappeared, part after part, while she herself performed choreography, which was funny at times, dramatic at others and sometimes even erotic. Presented video materials made references to the history of artistic avant-garde and to the beginnings of cinema, they invoked associations with the works of Man Ray or Oskar Schlemmer.

Aneta GRZESZYKOWSKA 1974, born in Warsaw; 1994- 1999 studied at the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; since 1999 collaborates with Jan Smaga. 2014– received Paszport Polityki award in Visual Arts category. Lives and works in Warsaw.