Aneta Grzeszykowska is a Polish artist who has turned her sense of self inside-out and back again in two photo series currently having a moment in New York: “Mama” (2018), for which she made an uncannily life-like doll of herself that she asked her young daughter to play with, and “Daughter” (2025), for which she donned a similarly disquieting mask of her younger self at age 14 and posed with members of her family, including her now-teenage daugther.

“Mama” features in the “New Humans” exhibition at the recently reopened New Museum and has shown in numerous contexts, including in the “Milk of Dreams” exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. “Daughter” is currently showing at Lyles & King gallery on the Lower East Side (through May 9) as well as in “Adolescence,” a recently opened group show at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The two series follow on from artwork Grzeszykowska has been making since she created “Album,” a 2005 series of old family photographs from which she removed herself, leaving a sort of present absence in pictures that are haunting and poetic in the extreme.