Aneta Grzeszykowska: Daughter
Lyles and King Gallery, NYC
April 10 – May 9, 2026
Images courtesy of Lyles and King Gallery and the Artist
Since her landmark 2005 project “Album,” in which she meticulously erased her own likeness from hundreds of family photographs, Aneta Grzeszykowska has proven herself a master of the missing self. She does not merely document existence; she dissects it, exposing the fragile, often fabricated nature of personal identity. Now, with her deeply unsettling new photographic series, “Daughter” (2025), she returns to the family archive, but this time she is aggressively, jarringly present.
The series coincides with her own child, Franka, entering puberty, a threshold that seems to have fractured time in Grzeszykowska’s creative consciousness. Instead of stepping behind the camera or erasing herself, the artist asserts her body into the frame alongside her family, but with a startling intervention: she wears a hyperrealistic, full-head mask of her own 14-year-old self.
The effect is immediately uncanny. It subverts the glossy, sun-drenched tropes of the social media vacation photo, injecting a quiet, unsettling horror into the pastoral setting. Grzeszykowska fully orchestrates these hyperreal tableaux, the idyllic light, the natural landscapes, the meticulous processing, yet she introduces a profound rupture. Encased in a blind mask, the artist is literally and metaphorically cut off from her subjects. She becomes an eerie alter ego to her own adolescent daughter, wandering through scenes that suggest youth is inevitably scarred by the looming reality of adulthood, just as adulthood remains forever haunted by the remnants of youth.
There is a profound biological poetry at work here. The series grapples with feto-maternal microchimerism, the literal exchange and retention of cellular material between mother and child during pregnancy. Grzeszykowska visualizes this porousness of identity, presenting the mother as an unstable entity who is simultaneously herself, her daughter, and her own mother. The traditional, linear march of caregiving is bent into a circle, pointing toward the inevitable future where roles will ultimately reverse.
Yet “Daughter” is as much a biting social critique as it is a familial meditation. By donning the face of a 14-year-old, Grzeszykowska forces a confrontation with society’s punishing expectations of female beauty. As her daughter ages into the cultural ideal, the mother feels the slipping away of her own socially defined worth. She is caught in a phantom pursuit of her own lost youth, usurping her child’s chronological place to test her varied, conflicting roles as wife, mother, and daughter.
Perhaps the most quietly devastating moment in the series occurs not between Grzeszykowska and her daughter, but between the artist and her own mother. In a poignant visual resolution, the older woman is the only one who truly recognizes the young Aneta. Her tender embrace of the masked figure bridges the jarring disconnect between how we are perceived in the present and our persistent, internal belief that we remain fundamentally unchanged across time. It is a mysterious, haunting exposition of the self, proving once again that Grzeszykowska is one of our most fearless explorers of the human condition.