PHOTO:
© Aneta Grzeszykowska Beauty Mask #02, 2017 Pigmenttinte auf Baumwollpapier Courtesy: Raster Gallery, Warsaw und KVOST, Berlin © Aneta Grzeszykowska
KVOST Artist Talk / Aneta Grzeszykowska und Rainald Schumacher
Sa, 03. Mai 2025
16:00 - 16:45
KVOST
Berlin
€
Free admission
In the organizer's words:
The starting point of Aneta Grzeszykowska's works is the construction, changeability and fragility of her own 'identity'. She plays with presence and absence, fragmentation, superficiality, the external image of oneself and the inner perception of one's own self, which is constantly changing.
Privacy Settings negotiates the interactions between intimacy and publicity, original and copy, self-image and external image. The exhibition invites us to reflect on our own 'privacy settings' in media reality. It offers an insight into various groups of works from the 2000s to the present day, which operate at the interface of photography, film, sculpture and performance and raise questions of identity, visibility and the construction of the self.
The relationship between body, surface, skin and mask, between the natural and the artificial image of the self is illuminated by the Beauty Masks from 2017, in which the artist stages herself in absurd, commercially available beauty masks. In doing so, she addresses rituals and ideas of beauty and self-presentation, as they have become established in social media as norms with mass appeal.
In more recent groups of works, Grzeszykowska works with skins, as in the Mama series from 2018. Pig skin and leather are sewn together and used to represent the body, masks, faces and animal figures. Irritating associations with a wounded, maltreated and scarred body are provoked. Mary Shelley did not give a name to the creature created in her novel 'Frankenstein'. She spoke of 'creature, fiend, being, demon or monster'. These works by Grzeszykowksa are a man-made creature, similar to a golem, and at the same time cite the erotic, fetishistic charge of masks, leather as a second skin and covering for the body.
Negative Book from 2012-2013 plays with the concept of reversing 'black and white'. Photographic negatives are presented as final images. The artist has painted her face, her skin and that of her daughter black and documented her everyday life in a real-time performance during a residency in Los Angeles. Her daughter is also the subject of the sculptural series Franciszka. These are white felt dolls in which the artist depicts her daughter's body in the future. In Album (2022), the artist uses her family archive and removes the daughter from the individual photographs using Photoshop.
The Iranian Stills series was created in 2015 during her stay in Iran. It documents the strangeness of the clothing prescribed for female tourists there and at the same time conveys the glamor of the late 1950s and the aura of a Grace Kelly. The artist's self-staging in the Untitled Film Stills from 2006, which are an appropriation and deconstruction of cinematic iconography, convey something similar. Grzeszykowska staged herself in the motifs of Cindy Sherman's series of the same name from 1977-1980.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, born in Warsaw in 1974, studied graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her works are represented in collections such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Center Pompidou in Paris, Fotomuseum in Winterthur and Museum Folkwang in Essen. In 2022 she took part in the 59th Venice Biennale.
This content has been machine translated.
Location
KVOST
Leipziger Str. 47
10117 Berlin
You might enjoy this as well?
Be always up-to-date with the latest events in Berlin!
The best event recommendations for the Rausgegangen App!