COURTESY THE ARTIST
New York’s Lyles & King gallery will now represent Aneta Grzeszykowska, the Polish artist whose eerie, alluring work ponders skin, avatars, and the body in oppressive societies. With the gallery, she will join a slate that includes Chris Hood and Mira Schor. Her next solo show at the gallery is planned for October 2018.
“I think Aneta is one of the foremost artists working with performative photography, sculpture, and video,” Isaac Lyles, a director of the gallery, said in a phone conversation today. “Like some of her great predecessors, Ana Mendieta and Alina Szapocznikow, the work is feminist and body-focused, but is about bigger issues: memory and how we experience each other through vision.”
Grzeszykowska, who is currently based in Warsaw, had two shows in New York last year, at Lyles & King and 11R. In those exhibitions, Grzeszykowska showed a series of pig-skin sculptures that resembled her body, alongside a group of photographs and a video. She has also recently shown work in New York in group shows at SculptureCenter and the New Museum. Her work is currently in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hammer Museum.
“She’s a curatorial darling, but she’s someone who’s due for more recognition in the United States,” Lyles said. “In some ways, she is a bridge between Ana Mendieta and Stewart Uoo, moving between performance and documentation. She’s a very radical artist. . . . I think [her work] will be quite revelatory.”