ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA

Early Life and Background

Aneta Grzeszykowska was born in Warsaw, where she continues to live and work. She studied graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, emerging in the late 1990s as part of the so-called Raster generation around the influential Warsaw gallery Raster.

From early on, Grzeszykowska gravitated towards photography and video as her primary media, using technically precise analogue and digital processes to stage complex self-portraits and performative actions. Her work developed in close dialogue with feminist image-making and the legacy of artists such as Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmon, and Alina Szapocznikow, while remaining rooted in the social and cultural context of post-socialist Poland.

Aneta Grzeszykowska Artworks

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s artworks revolve around selfhood, mortality, and the instability of images, using masks, prosthetics, silicone doubles, and collaged photographs to question where the body ends and representation begins. Across series in photography, film, and sculpture, she repeatedly stages her own disappearance or duplication, shifting between human, animal, and object to test how identity is constructed, erased, or projected.

Identity, erasure, and feminist image histories

Key early projects such as Album (2005), Untitled Film Stills (2006), and Negative Book (2012–17) use family photographs and art-historical references to explore how memory and personal history are edited, rewritten, or removed. In Love Book (2010), the artist inserts her image into works by Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, positioning herself within a feminist lineage while acknowledging the violence and premature deaths that haunt these precedents.

The acclaimed series Selfie (2014) extends this inquiry through photographs of fragmented body casts and masks that hover between life and death, echoing Szapocznikow’s sculptures and Surrealist photography while confronting viewers with an uncanny, dismembered self. Later projects such as Face Book (2019) and Negative Blood (2017–20), in which she paints with photosensitive emulsion made from her own blood, translate introspective self-portraiture into experimental, materially intense images.

Family, domestic space, and the uncanny

Grzeszykowska’s practice often turns to domestic relationships and motherhood, foregrounding the family as a site where identity, care, and power are negotiated. The series Mama (2018) presents a life-sized silicone replica of the artist posed with her daughter, creating photographs in which the surrogate body functions as both maternal stand-in and inanimate object.

Works like Domestic Animals (2022), where pigskin masks of the artist’s face are fitted onto her dogs, and the series THE DAUGHTER (2025), in which she performs wearing a mask of her fourteen-year-old self, disturb conventional hierarchies between child and parent, human and animal, subject and prop. These projects culminate in the exhibition DISORDER at Voloshyn Gallery in Miami, where interwoven series probe domestic power structures, memory, and generational role reversal through staged photographs and sculptures.

Collections and Institutional Recognition

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s work has gained international recognition and has been included in major museum collections, underlining her importance in contemporary art. Her artworks are held by institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others.

Grzeszykowska has exhibited in key international platforms, including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale exhibition in the Central Pavilion, where her contributions were presented in relation to feminist histories and corporeal transformation. Institutional solo exhibitions such as Family Skin at Francisco Carolinum, Linz, and the show at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, strengthened her profile as a pivotal figure in Polish and global contemporary art.

Aneta Grzeszykowska Exhibitions

Aneta Grzeszykowska has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions in museums, biennials, and galleries across Europe and the United States. To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Aneta Grzeszykowska, follow her on Ocula.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2025, DISORDER, Voloshyn Gallery, Miami, encompassing series including THE DAUGHTER, Domestic Animals, and Mama, exploring domestic hierarchies, identity, and the porous boundaries between human, animal, and object
• 2022, Domestic Animals, Lyles & King, New York, photographic series of pigskin masks fitted to dogs that reflect on recognition, estrangement, and projection
• 2020, Family Skin, Francisco Carolinum, Linz, survey of photographic and sculptural works examining skin, bodily doubles, and mortality
• 2013, Śmierć i dziewczyna (Death and the Girl), Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, solo exhibition addressing mortality, femininity, and the image of the female body.

Select group exhibitions

• 2022, The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Central Pavilion, Venice, curated thematic exhibition situating Grzeszykowska among artists engaging with body, metamorphosis, and technological imaginaries
• 2020, collection displays and thematic group shows including Family Skin at Francisco Carolinum, Linz, foregrounding photographic and sculptural experimentations with the body
• Various group exhibitions at international museums and galleries such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA, Centre Pompidou, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Aneta Grzeszykowska FAQs

Ocula | 2025