Aneta Grzeszykowska

Post-1989 Warsaw — The Raster Generation and the Photograph as a Manipulable Image

Grzeszykowska studied graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, graduating in 1999. Her early work moved among photography, video, and design and included collaborations with Jan Smaga, her husband and longtime collaborator, beginning with projects that translated interiors and architecture into images. Culture.pl places her among the “Raster generation,” which emerged as new galleries and critical networks developed after the collapse of the socialist system^*12. In a 2025 interview, Grzeszykowska recalled that around the time she graduated, Raster began looking for young artists in Warsaw, making a full-time artistic career seem newly possible^*16. After graduation, photography and video became her principal media, with digital editing, staged photography, film, and bodily replicas selected according to the needs of each work. Muzeum Sztuki notes that photography offered her unusually detailed control over both the production process and the final result^*1. CAM St. Louis likewise centered its exhibition on the repeated appearance, disappearance, and substitution of the body across her photography and video^*2.

Album — Removing Herself from the Life Story Constructed by the Family Album

Album (2004) digitally removes Grzeszykowska from more than 200 photographs accumulated by the artist and her family over roughly thirty years. The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw identifies it as an album assembled from family snapshots originally made as records of everyday life^*3. Culture.pl describes the result as an autobiography in photographs without its protagonist: the artist disappears from a private archive extending from her birth to the time the work was made^*13. The intervention extends beyond any single frame to the album as a sequence of birthdays, trips, meals, and group photographs that ordinarily tells a viewer, “this person lived within this family.” After the erasure, the gazes of others, the spacing between bodies, and the empty places remain, allowing her absence to be inferred from the relationships around it. Grzeszykowska later described Album as the first stage in a sequence of “losing myself” that continued through Untitled Film Stills, Negative Book, and Selfie^*15. The work makes visible both the family album’s role in organizing evidence of a life and the author’s power to alter that organization.

Untitled Film Stills — Reworking Sherman’s 69 Images as 70 Color Photographs

Grzeszykowska’s 2006 Untitled Film Stills takes Cindy Sherman’s 69-part Untitled Film Stills as its point of reference and reworks it as seventy color photographs featuring Grzeszykowska herself. Art Collection Telekom records Sherman’s original as 69 images and Grzeszykowska’s version as 70^*20. Raster notes that she matched compositions and makeup to the source images while sourcing backgrounds and clothing in contemporary Warsaw, completing the full series over the course of a year^*10. In Sherman’s original, her body repeatedly becomes a woman who might have appeared in a film; MoMA discusses the works as images in which Sherman appears without classifying them as self-portraits^*23. Grzeszykowska made the entire series, already established within art history, the object of reenactment. Discussing #54, Arsenal Gallery observes that as Sherman’s body disappears from the frame and Grzeszykowska takes its place, Sherman becomes more insistent in the viewer’s memory^*19. Grzeszykowska later described a double erasure: she had “removed Sherman and put myself in,” yet viewers still recognized Sherman, which made Grzeszykowska herself harder to see^*16. The series builds a self-portrait in which sitter, author, and remembered source image no longer align.

Negative Book — Making the Body Obey the Negative

Negative Book (2012–13) makes the analog photographic negative itself a condition of production. Grzeszykowska painted her skin and hair black and adjusted the tones of clothing and interiors so that her body would appear light on the negative. The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw holds works including #63 and #78 and publishes their material information as black-and-white photographs^*4. The museum’s video Negative Process records the black-painted body being photographed, making the reversal between negative and print central to the production process^*6. Art Collection Telekom similarly describes a series that imports photography’s rules of tonal reversal into scenes resembling ordinary family pictures, with the body itself altered to meet those rules^*9. Raster’s photobook edits the procedure into a sequence of everyday situations, poses, and interiors^*11. The distinction between manipulation performed after exposure in software and manipulation performed on the body before exposure becomes unstable; the stage at which the image is made becomes the subject of the work.

Selfie and Mama — Turning the Face into Skin, and the Mother into a Doll

In Selfie (2014), Grzeszykowska constructed fragments of her face and body from pigskin and photographed them. In the work held by the Centre Pompidou, precisely fabricated eyes, mouth, and seams in the skin meet the immediacy associated with the selfie in an unsettling way^*7. For Mama (2018), she made a silicone doll in her own likeness and photographed her daughter, Franciszka, carrying, embracing, playing with, and burying this “mother.” The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw holds fourteen works from the 2018 series^*5. ArtReview recorded the series as twenty-five images when it was first shown and read the daughter’s play with the silicone figure as a reversal of mother-and-child roles^*21. The review also connected that reversal around motherhood to Poland’s abortion law and the political conditions surrounding women’s bodies at the time^*21. In a 2025 interview, Grzeszykowska emphasized that she, the actual mother, photographs from outside the frame, allowing viewers to begin accepting the doll as the “mother”^*16. The silicone figure is recognized as the mother inside the picture while the artist remains on the camera side. Facial resemblance, the daughter’s actions, and the title attach the maternal role to the doll.

Digital Editing, Negatives, Skin, Dolls — A Different Process for Each Series

Grzeszykowska changes the process of manipulation from one series to the next. Album uses Photoshop; Negative Book uses film and the negative; Selfie combines pigskin sculpture with digital printing; Mama uses a silicone doll and staged photography. Art Collection Telekom describes a body of work spanning photography, film, books, and staged production while repeatedly returning to the body as material^*8. A Frieze review likewise reads the work from Untitled Film Stills through Selfie as a movement between historical photographic forms and the physical substance of the body^*17. What links the series is the repeated assignment of “her” identity to a different form, followed by a test of how securely that form can sustain the claim. In the photobook Negative Book, photographs that can be encountered individually on a wall enter the sequence of pages, allowing the inverted body to be read as moving through the time of everyday life^*11.

Why Use Her Own Body? — The Most Controllable Model Becomes the Least Stable Subject

Grzeszykowska gives a practical reason for using herself as a model: it allows her to control the production in detail^*16. With that statement in mind, self-portraiture becomes an experimental setup in which author, subject, and director can be concentrated in one person. In an interview with Contemporary Lynx, she describes Album, Untitled Film Stills, Negative Book, and Selfie as successive stages of “losing myself”^*15. Erasure, entry into another artist’s image, inversion by the negative, and the fragmentation of skin form a sequence in which identity gradually separates from the body that can be most tightly controlled. Lyles & King likewise identifies the construction and erasure of the self, the gendered body, and combinations of artificial and organic matter as long-running concerns in her work^*18.

After Sherman — From the Body Performing a Role to the Body’s Absence

In the 1970s, Cindy Sherman used her own body in Untitled Film Stills to inhabit cinematic female types, exposing how images of women are produced through familiar conventions of film and photography. MoMA describes the series as an examination of images of women through roles such as the “career girl,” the vamp, and the lonely housewife^*23. In 2006, Grzeszykowska made seventy color photographs referring to Sherman’s series, then shifted the carrier of the self-image toward the family album, the negative, pigskin, and a silicone doll. CAM St. Louis places the recurring appearance, disappearance, and substitution of the body at the center of her work in both photography and video^*2. In Mama, the artist stands behind the camera while a silicone “mother” spends time with her daughter inside the frame. Grzeszykowska explains that the fact that she, the actual mother, remains outside the picture is what allows the viewer to begin accepting the doll as the mother^*16. Sherman’s staged images locate the body as the site of role-playing. In Grzeszykowska’s later works, resemblance, titles, and family behavior can sustain a self-image even when the artist’s body is outside the picture. The question of self-portraiture moves toward the clues that make a person recognizable as themselves.

From Album to Mama — What Carries the Self Changes from Series to Series

In Album, the sequence of family photographs tells a life; in Untitled Film Stills, a familiar artwork helps identify the author; in Negative Book, the tonal logic of the negative determines how the body appears. Fragments of facial skin become a cue in Selfie, while a silicone doll performs that function in Mama. AWARE discusses this body of work through self-representation, the body, and critical approaches to images of women^*14. Raster’s 2022 exhibition WAVE returned to Album: Grzeszykowska continued removing herself from family photographs extending beyond the birth of her daughter, while Skinformer rendered the bodily image as stitched skin^*22. The methods change sharply from early digital erasure to recent artificial skin and dolls, yet each series isolates one basis on which a viewer recognizes someone in a photograph. Self-portraiture becomes a way to test, one by one, whether memory, authorship, the negative, skin, or family relations produce the recognition of a person as “herself.”