Aneta Grzeszykowska Shoots Portraits in a Mask of Herself at Age 14

Aneta Grzeszykowska is a Polish artist who has turned her sense of self inside-out and back again in two photo series currently having a moment in New York: “Mama” (2018), for which she made an uncannily life-like doll of herself that she asked her young daughter to play with, and “Daughter” (2025), for which she donned a similarly disquieting mask of her younger self at age 14 and posed with members of her family, including her now-teenage daugther.

“Mama” features in the “New Humans” exhibition at the recently reopened New Museum and has shown in numerous contexts, including in the “Milk of Dreams” exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. “Daughter” is currently showing at Lyles & King gallery on the Lower East Side (through May 9) as well as in “Adolescence,” a recently opened group show at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The two series follow on from artwork Grzeszykowska has been making since she created “Album,” a 2005 series of old family photographs from which she removed herself, leaving a sort of present absence in pictures that are haunting and poetic in the extreme.

A.i.A. spoke with Grzeszykowska about “Mama,” “Daughter,” and how she has come to consider herself a viewer of her own work.

How would you describe the evolution of your thinking from the “Mama” series to your new “Daughter” works?

My practice is mostly based on a strategy of putting props into real life and using my family members or my animals as performers. By using props, I can control the scenery of my life. For the “Mama” series, I ordered this doll that was half of me and gave it to my daughter to play with. This new series is the next step, because by wearing a head of me at the age of 14, I was able to move the story of my life forward and backward. I constructed a hybrid that consists of my more-than-50-year-old body and the head of me at 14—not yet an adult but a child. This was important because being a teenager is a kind of hybrid of different identities from different periods of life.

How did you start working with your family in your images?

It allows me to change the hierarchy within my family. That was the case in “Mama” because it involved a child who could do anything she wanted with her mother. It changed the relationship from a psychological point of view, and in “Daughter” the situation is similar because I am sort of unconscious—because this head is blind. I cannot see anything while wearing the mask, so I construct a performative situation and then ask, say, my mother to do something with me. I don’t control what she will do, so I can’t control the image. I only see it after it happens, so in a way I’m watching these pictures. That’s interesting for me: being unconscious and being used by other people who are performing in my art.

What kinds of directives would you give?  

For this one [DAUGHTER #3] with my husband, I set up the camera and a timer, put on the mask, and just said, “Do something.” There’s one with my mother seeing me in the mask for the first time. When my father first saw me, he kept at a distance. But for her I think it was the first time in a long time she could hold me like this [cradling her head in her hand]. I don’t know about your family situation, but we didn’t show affection this way. When you are a child, you are close to your parents. But then, later, not so much. I don’t remember situations like this. But of course it’s the viewer who interprets the situation, and I’m also a viewer here.

How did you make the mask?

I have friends from the Academy of Fine Arts who make props for movies. It’s interesting for me that they really do make them for movies. This work is like creating a kind of movie for me.

But using this kind of prop, which is a very artificial thing, it’s important to have moments of truth in the photographs. It’s not so easy to achieve, because here everything is not-real. So what I try to construct is the emotion a viewer will have after watching these pictures. You can really focus on the situation in the frame, and everything else around somehow starts to be less important.

What did your daughter think of the seeing you as your younger self? What kinds of conversations do you and she have about your work?

She’s 15 now, and I think children from art families are very specific. [Laughs.] They know what art is from the beginning. I made a series titled “Selfie” where I reconstructed parts of myself with pig skin. She was four at the time, and with her grandmother she found me constructing the work on the table in the kitchen, making human organs with meat. She said, “Oh, wow, it’s very beautiful, Mama. You did it very well.” She and I don’t talk very much about interpretations. I don’t feel like the figure of the “mother artist”—the work just happens.

What is it like for you to see yourself in the mask?

I will admit that this work was quite difficult for me. In some ways it’s easy, but from another point of view it’s difficult to find real truth in an artificial situation. When I was younger, I used my body very much in my work. I was fit and beautiful. But as I got older, I kind of stopped because I don’t think of myself with much body positivity. From the bodies of women we expect beauty. Here, everything is beautiful, but there is something very brutal in the beauty.

Was the blinding aspect of the mask a decision you made, or was it a matter of necessity?

I really love the idea of being unconscious while creating art. In the “Mama” series, my daughter is very clever, but she was a child then and didn’t exactly know what she was doing. After that I made “Domestic Animals” (2022), a series with dogs wearing masks of me and also performing. It’s interesting for me that they create art while not even knowing what they do.

The “Mama” series features in the “New Humans” exhibition at the New Museum. What do you think of the show?

I love the exhibition because it thinks about art in an expansive context. I love that they put, for example, pictures from medical experiments in a show with props from movies. For me, art is something wide that can be constructed by a child or a dog. Art just happens, and my position is to see and catch it. I like the exhibition because it combines things that were produced as “art” with other things that were not. It is not very hermetic—it’s more absorbing, like going to a natural history museum and seeing different kinds of objects. I like this way of thinking about art.

“Mama” and “Daughter” both relate to motherhood. How do the two series differ to you in that regard?

I’m happy that “Mama” is in the “New Humans” exhibition, because some of that show is about humanity from an almost science-fiction point of view. Being pregnant was a very strange time for me, because I couldn’t understand how a new body was growing inside me. In my work I try to question very basic things that we don’t think about because we’ve gotten used to them. A new body grows out of your body, and you grew from your mother’s body before. It’s very strange, don’t you think? I try to entertain people by constructing different levels of interpretation for my work. But I want viewers to be struck by the images and to feel as if they are watching the kind of movie we call tragicomedy. I think that is the best description of our lives.