Weronika Gęsicka

Photographer, visual artist, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. She predominantly works on found images, reflecting on the essence of memory. She is equally keen to use photos from old newspapers and police archives, as well as random photographs found on the Internet. She was born in 1984 in Włocławek.

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Weronika Gęsicka, photo: courtesy of the artist

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Weronika Gęsicka once declared that she is fascinated by the seeming objectivity of photography. She carefully scrapes off this illusory coating in her works, revealing the layers of ambiguity hidden beneath. She started exploring these ideas and gaining recognition thanks to the series Traces. It was presented in 2016 at the ShowOFF section during Krakow Photomonth and published a year later as a photo book.

Traces was born from an accidental find. As the artist said in a conversation with journalist Basia Czyżewska:

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[...] I came across photographs that at first glance looked as if they’d been taken out of a family album. They were photos from the 1950s and 1960s, mostly American. This era evokes specific associations in us, somewhat stereotypical clichés: children in perfectly ironed clothes playing nicely on a carpet, a man with a briefcase returning home to be joyfully welcomed by the whole family, and a smiling woman busy roasting a turkey or decorating cookies with pink icing (in obligatory high heels and with red lipstick on her lips).

Gęsicka operates with perfect ease in this style and is able to seamlessly imitate the clichés of post-war America’s visual culture, as evidenced by the cover of the book version of Traces. Made from red leather with an embossed title, its rounded font harks back to the typographic trends of the early 1960s.

The title Traces may refer to the role of photography itself, but in Gęsicka’s works these traces of reality have little in common with the direct recording of important moments, situations or encounters. The photographer follows traces that have long been erased, photographs orphaned in Internet archives, whose origin no one remembers any more:

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In photo banks [...] conventional scenes, often played by models, are mixed with the less obvious, images that are more casual and intimate. So I started to wonder which of them are real and which are posed and what these sorts of photos can actually tell us about the past, since we can’t be certain what the story behind them might be.

Gęsicka does not try to find out who the protagonists are or what we are actually seeing in each photograph – authentic family photos, holiday souvenirs or sometimes genre scenes created by advertising experts for the needs of campaigns in glossy magazines. From today’s perspective, every one of these sugar-coated scenes featuring carefully coiffed women in flared dresses, their lips framing wreaths of snow-white teeth in studied smiles, look without exception like anachronistic creations.

Traces by Weronika Gęsicka – Image Gallery

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It is hard to separate which images might be records of real life from those that are staged – Gęsicka’s series seems to undermine this very distinction. We observe photographic traces of reality just as much as we do the ‘reality’ created by the magazine photography of publications like Life. The relationship between life and its photographic record runs along two tracks here: advertising imitates life, and life imitates advertising. As the character Don Draper says in the series Mad Men: ‘What you call “love” was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.’

The artist emphasises this ambiguity by introducing Photoshop distortions into these found images. Individual elements are carefully manipulated to build her collages while she hides the seams. The final surreal effect is largely due to the specific way photography plays with illusion.

The transformations all have an element that is both comic and disturbing at the same time. In one group portrait, all the family members have identical features – the smooth, smiling faces of wax figures. In a scene from a dance, men shrunk to the size of teenagers bury their faces in the breasts of their partners. In another genre scene, a man returns from work, puts down his briefcase and stretches his arms towards the children running to meet him, his two toddlers happily rushing towards him into the black abyss that cuts through the yard.

Gęsicka is primarily interested in the work of memory. The distortions she presents in her photographic collages, while on the one hand obviously unreal and on the other disturbingly real, illustrate the hazy nature of memories – individual situations are exaggerated or diminished, others are distorted or repressed, and others seem completely real but never took place.

The division of gender roles presented in Traces is also significant:

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The first photos, the ones which sparked the entire project, are photographs of ideal couples in love. They showed relationships in a very stereotypical way: women were well-groomed and submissive, men were masculine and dominant. I was tempted to change these relationships. For example, in the photo of three girls sitting on their boyfriends’ shoulders, I removed the heads of the boys so that they now seem to be immersed in these women. So despite their submissive position, the women now become more dominant.

These last themes – the deceptive work of memory and the steering of women to stay under a homely glass bell jar – were developed by Gęsicka in her 2018 exhibition I Remember My Birth for the Project Room of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. This time, the surreal distortions from Traces were spread throughout the entire exhibition space, which was filled with oversized and shiny kitchen appliances that were non-functional but disturbing in detail, like a grater with blades in the shape of manicured female fingers.

The artist subjected household objects to similar transformations in her next series of photographic collages, titled Collection. This time a mop is given the top of a red-headed woman’s wig, rubber gloves turn out to be more ‘human’ than the hands from which they were removed, and a pillow is thrown onto a bed tied up with rope like a woman’s body in an erotic shibari position.

Gęsicka’s interest in memory may remind some of Aneta Grzeszykowska’s work. However, while the formally surrealist ‘packshots’ from the Collection series may bring to mind Grzeszykowska’s Selfie, the subject of interest for both photographers is significantly different. While Grzeszykowska consistently examines herself in relation to others – whether by erasing herself from a family album, or creating a naturalistic doll-self-portrait and giving it to her daughter – Gęsicka transfers her gaze to objects and gestures, adopting a more anthropological attitude.

In her Clinch series, Gęsicka focuses on gestures and the body memory recorded within them. In sequences of black-and-white frames, the artist presents individual movements, stripped of the scenography and colourful surroundings known from her other series. In Clinch, one can register the echoes of Frowst by Joanna Piotrowska, but above all the famous 19th-century photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. Just as in the early days of photography when the camera revealed details, like a galloping horse, that escaped the human eye, Gęsicka uses the lens to perform a similar visual dissection on gestures that are less dynamic but equally elusive.

Originally written in Polish by Piotr Policht, Aug 2019, updated June 2025, translated by Michał Pelczar, June 2025

Lifestyles in Progress: Weronika Gęsicka’s 'Traces'

Selected individual exhibitions:

2019 – 'Seltsam', Polish Institute, Düsseldorf
2018 – 'I Remember my Birth', Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw
2017 – "Traces" Fotografic Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic
"Traces", Phnom Penh Photo Festival, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Selected collective exhibitions:

2018 – 'Foam Talent', Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany
'Family Values: Polish Photography Now', Calvert 22 Foundation, London, Great Britain
'Bodyfiction', ZOYA Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia
2017 – 'Foam Talent', Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Paris Photo, Grand Palais, Paris, France
'Blocked. TIFF Festival // Resources', Wrocław Contemporary Museum
2016 – 'Vice Magazine Photo Show' Industria Superstudios, New York, USA
14. Photo Month, Krakow

Weronika Gęsicka

contemporary polish photographers

contemporary polish photography