Both Aneta Grzeszykowska and her husband Jan Smaga both graduated from the Graphic Design Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Grzeszykowska in 1999, Smaga in 2000). Today they are photographers working both together and independently, creating works that are characterised by an intimate approach to their subject. They often set themselves up as their subject, deepening the intimate aspect of personal photography. At the same time, they are very much engaged in experimentation with digital techniques to manipulate their images and create new contexts, exploring the ways in which reality can be transformed. In 2005 the pair was nominated for the Deutsche Bank Views award for young artists and in 2006 for the prestigious Polityka Award.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, Album In her career as a solo artist, Grzeszykowska focuses on the combined media of film and photography to create metaphorical, symbolic narratives of childhood, womanhood and self-awareness. She often treats her subject as a marionette or a soulless character, which brings to the surface issues related to objectification and anonymity. In her 2005 project Untitled (Photographs), she used photoshop techniques to create photographs of non-existent people. Her 2006 Album project comprises over 200 photographs from Aneta Grzeszykowska's private family archive. Using Photoshop, the artist removed her own figure from each picture, thus creating a peculiar photographic autobiography - from the birth up till now - devoid of the protagonist.
Absence or partial absence continued to be a there in her work, with her 2007 fiction film Black, focusing on the image of her own naked body stuck in an abyss, with certain body parts hidden, while others appear in fragments, only to disappear again. The limbo quality of the image was made using analogue trick photography and animation techniques. In her next film Headache (2009), her naked body goes through a series of changes in a black void. It is in this blackness that the illusion comes to life and the body is given the status of an object, making the act of dismemberment believable. Cleanly chopped, each limb performs a separate task, taking on a life of its own with an almost animalistic mystique, the hand pulling the hair, the head spitting on the hand, the hand slapping the head, the four limbs ganging up on the head until it is exhausted, only to be pulled up to rejoin the rest of the body. It is a the dance pantomime tells us the story of the self-destructive impulses of the body, the story that reaches its conclusion with a deceptive happy end. The head is a passive victim of violence incapable of defense against limbs that are in revolt, an analysis of self-hatred and punishment which can also be understood as a metaphor for the ambiguous relationship between a sovereign and its subjects, for power and submission.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, Untitled #17 (fragment), 2005, c-print, dibond, plexi, 81x64 cm Her 2008 project Doll is a figurative representation of the artist across various stages in her life, dressed up just as she had been dressed in each particular period. These figures give an impression of being eerily distant. The doll figures question the relation of a human being's different incarnations throughout life. Reduced to black and white, minimalistic sequence of flat and three-dimensional images which represent artist's treats the body in an unsentimental, strictly experimental way - yet, nonetheless, the work has an emotional impact on the viewer.
In 2012 Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga invited gallery goers into the private space fo their home - their workshops and their private spaces showing the artists at work and play, experimenting, relaxing and making love. The project builds on their earlier Plan project (2004), which provided a detailed sociological inventory of a contemporary living space. Private Archive is a radical encroachment of that convention. It is a journal of emotion, which records the authors' fantasies, which are sometimes beautiful, other times shameful. They weave these fantasies into the flesh of their bodies, into their art, pulling down the curtains and opening up an otherwise private discussion on making art and making love.
