Aneta Grzeszykowska, Selfie
7.02-3.05 2015
Viborgkunsthal, Viborg
Selfie lies between photography and sculpture. At its heart is the analysis of the process of self-creation – one of the most fundamental themes of art and also a basic premise for the condition of the post-medial society of today.
Grzeszykowska makes a radical turn in the direction of the grotesque, creating startling sculptural charades using fragments of her own body, modeled in pigskin and exhibited on smooth leather backgrounds. Her selfie takes on an uncanny quality as she creates a self-portrait out of many parts. She treats corporeality, sensuality and auto-eroticism with black humor, which transforms the aesthetic experience into a struggle with basic existential emotions. Her refined compositions resemble the terrifying props of a horror film set. As in the classics of this genre, death imitates life, while life – the artist’s hands visible in the photographs – is deadened as she gestures towards these impermanent sculptural objects.
The fragmentation of the body, through the surreal exercise of sculpting select organs and the use of tight photographic frames, leads to a leveling of the processes of creation and destruction. And those fragments of the female body are at the same time actual pieces of an animal’s flesh. Grzeszykowska takes apart her own image and manipulates the vision of her body in various ways, citing, for example, the themes inherent in the work of Alina Szapocznikow. She persists approaching the radical and jarring assertion that self-creation is but another, fallible means of struggling with the mortal nature of the body.