Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Family Portraits Make Identity Feel Unstable
Two photo series by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska (b. 1974) are drawing attention in New York, where they turn self-portraiture into a study of family roles, performance, and control. In “Mama” (2018), she commissioned a life-like doll of herself and gave it to her young daughter to play with. In “Daughter” (2025), she wears a mask modeled on her face at age 14 and poses with relatives, including her now-teenage daughter.
The two bodies of work are linked by a long-running interest in using props to unsettle the ordinary logic of family photographs. “Mama” is included in “New Humans” at the newly reopened New Museum and was also shown in “Milk of Dreams” at the 2022 Venice Biennale. “Daughter” is on view at Lyles & King on the Lower East Side through May 9 and is also included in “Adolescence” at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
Grzeszykowska has been developing this approach for years. In “Album” (2005), she removed herself from old family photographs, leaving behind a conspicuous absence that reads as both formal and emotional. She has said that her practice often relies on props and on family members or animals as performers, a method that lets her alter the hierarchy inside the image and, by extension, inside the family itself.
The mask in “Daughter” adds another layer of distance. Because it is blind, Grzeszykowska cannot see while wearing it, which means she sets up the scene and only encounters the finished image afterward. That loss of control is central to the work’s tension. The photographs feel staged, but not sealed; they hold a quiet uncertainty that keeps them from becoming simple tableaux.
She has also pointed to earlier projects such as “Selfie,” which involved reconstructed body parts with pig skin, and “Domestic Animals” (2022), in which dogs wore masks of her. Taken together, the works suggest an artist less interested in likeness than in the unstable space where likeness breaks down.
In Grzeszykowska’s hands, the family album becomes something stranger: a record of intimacy, but also of distance, role reversal, and the uneasy theater of being seen.
