Untitled Films Stills #54

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s works refer to a series of photographs Untitled Film Stills created by the American artist Cindy Sherman between 1977 and 1980. Sherman photographed herself in dozens of staged situations alluding to frames from black-and-white films from the 1950s and 1960s. These works received enthusiastic reviews from critics, especially those formulated from feminist positions. They were regarded as groundbreaking for the formation of social and artistic independence of female artists in the early 1980s.

Grzeszykowska reproduced the settings once arranged by Sherman with great accuracy and photographed herself on their background. Playing the roles previously assumed by Sherman, she transposed the black-and-white photographs into colour, thus giving them both greater artificiality and, paradoxically, realness. These photographs refer to the past from two perspectives: one is the poetics of the 1950s and 1960s films to which Sherman had referred, and the other are Sherman’s own works. However, while the American photographer played with stereotypes of women and the roles ascribed to them, Grzeszykowska was interested in the question of her own identity.

Critics have interpreted the Polish artist’s work in the context of “appropriation art”. Grzeszykowska did indeed make use of images produced by someone else, but she used them instrumentally. In Untitled Film Stills #2, #54 and #62, it is the artist herself and the way she manipulates her identity that are important. Grzeszykowska marks her presence in the work of another artist by means of her own figure. In doing so, however, she doubly excludes herself: both in a creative sense, as she works with an image and concept that are not her own, and in a physical sense. Cindy Sherman is not seen in any of the photographs, but she is present everywhere. By replacing her, Grzeszykowska brings Sherman to the foreground and hides herself. “It is like annihilating myself in the work of another artist,” she says. She imposes herself on the viewer, however, through an insistent absence: she is absent, but it is impossible to erase her from the photograph’s specifications. Grzeszykowska uses the gesture of appropriation to separate the work from the artist; to disconnect her works from herself and to give them the status of autonomous objects or independent entities.