The artist’s feminist way of per­ceiving image and art finds its ful­lest and most direct expres­sion in the Love Book. In this fold-​out album con­sisting of 18 col­lages, Grzeszykow­ska juxtaposes her image with frag­ments of works by her artistic precur­sors, whose art was infor­med by feminism, specifically: Fran­cesca Wood­man, Ana Men­dieta, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Birgit Jur­gens­sen, Hannah Wilke, and Helen Chadwick. All of them, like Grzeszykow­ska, used their own bodies as material and (unlike Grzeszykow­ska) direc­tly addres­sed the problems of represen­tation introduced by feminism. Also, all of them died prematurely. Grzeszykow­ska places her own body – or rather its images – next to their bodies in a dynamic relation­ship of love and violence: in some of the col­lages we could assume that we are wit­nes­sing a sexual act that is anachronistic in its being incredibly untimely – at times full of intimacy and delicacy, at times quite violent – in others, it is hard not to assume that Grzeszykow­ska is devouring her female “partners.”








Aneta Grzeszykowska
Love Book

2010
18 collages of variable dimensions in a folding book, cloth binding, 30 x 30 x 5 cm, ed. of 15 + 2 A.P.