Lyles & King is pleased to present Daughter, a solo exhibition of Aneta Grzeszykowska's photographs opening Friday, April 10.

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s new series Daughter (2025) coincides with the artist’s child entering puberty, which irrevocably bends time in Grzeszykowska’s careful vivisection of family relationships – a subject she has been mining in her provocative photography and sculpture since the now legendary Album (2005), where she erased herself from hundreds of photographs in the family archive.

In Daughter, Grzeszykowska carefully stages her body – wearing a realistic full-head mask of her younger self – with family members. As the artist says, these photographs show “a child wounded by adulthood, an adult wounded by childhood.” Both the child and the adult carry the molecules of time past and time present, and the seeds – or crawling anxiety – of a future.

Grzeszykowska‘s responses over the years to her daughter’s growth show mother’s experience, in which giving life inevitably leads to a sense of split personality. Her art is a record of such porosity, or instability, of mother’s personhood. It is actually rooted in biology, thanks to a phenomenon of feto-maternal microchimerism, a bidirectional migration of cells during pregnancy, that then remain in both organisms. It is possible to imagine this physical bond as one affecting time: the mother as both her daughter and her own mother at the same time.

What seems just a metaphor made urgent by life’s passing, has its material foundation in biology and in temporality of the labor of care – where roles will ultimately revert and the mother will become the daughter.

This new body of work by Aneta Grzeszykowska also engages with social critique – a woman’s endless struggle to meet societal expectations of beauty. Arriving at the time when it suddenly becomes dependent on age, she realizes that what persists as a measure of woman’s worth must be irreversibly lost, and the mother finds herself in constant pursuit of her daughter.

Donning a fully realistic mask of herself at the age of her daughter, Aneta Grzeszykowska not only usurps a 14-year-old body, but tests her roles and relationships as a mother, a daughter, and a wife. The artist fully controls the hyperrealist staging: the light, the setting in nature, the photographic processing – but cannot guide the performance as her blind mask becomes a layer of actual detachment from her close-ones. With the crack between her body and the mask of her younger self as Franka’s alter ego, or as Franka’s best friend, she bends time as well as social expectations of body beauty and emotional maturity. Poignantly, the only body that recognizes the young Aneta is her mother’s. Her tender embrace is the only one that knows Aneta as herself of the past.

The quiet, perfect framing plays with the tropes of happy vacations that saturate social media – there is a rupture here between fiction and reality, a sudden silence. The expectation of a sunny day becoming a set of a horror movie is always a possibility in Grzeszykowska’s art. The artist has been using props and staging in her photography to isolate and intensify elements of reality – but in the Daughter series, we see her using time as if a film reel to (over)expose cracks in one’s identity. Grzeszykowska’s exercises in ontology show the discontinuity of our existence as reflected in social perception – in conflict with how we perceive ourselves: as one and same across time.

—by Monika Fabijanska

Aneta Grzeszykowska's (b. 1974, Warsaw, Poland) photographs are currently on view in New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale; Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE; Kunstforum tu Darmstad, Darmstad, DE; The Francisco Carolinum Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Linz, AT; Raster, Warsaw, PL; MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, PL; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, US; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, DE; Fotografiska Stockholm, Stockholm, SE; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, CH; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, PL; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, HU; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, MX; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US; among many others. Her work is included in several museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna; and many others. Grzeszykowska is represented by Raster Gallery and Lyles & King. She lives and works in Warsaw.