Almost Everything

In her work Aneta Grzeszykowska takes up existential themes, examines the phenomenon of identity and tracks the ambivalences of the human image.

The artist is interested in the performative dimension of photography and in the potential of the medium to allow images to be manipulated and creatively travestied. She removes figures from photographs, questions her own identity, and unceremoniously appropriates the works of other women artists for her own purposes.

Grzeszykowska’s primary creative material is her own body, through which she explores the complex spectrum of identity. What counts for her on the conceptual level is equally the experience and the emotions she draws from her own life. She usually works in series, which allows her to rework the various aspects of the problems and phenomena she takes up. Alongside her photographs, Grzeszykowska’s best-known works include the doll-sculptures she has been sewing since 2007 as self-portraits or as imagined likenesses of her daughter in the future.

The exhibition is retrospective in character. It will present works from eleven photographic series produced between 2006 and 2026, as well as videos and the sculpture Franciszka 2025 from the Ujazdowski Castle Collection. The thematic coherence that runs through Grzeszykowska’s practice allows combining photographs from different series achronologically. Out of this singular palimpsest emerges a story of the progressive deconstruction of one’s own identity, mounting existential anxiety and inevitable passing, a gradual slide into nothingness. Happily, the artist frequently counters the gravity of her subject matter with humorous touches, and her works are wrapped in an aura of the uncanny.