JOANNA GROCHOWSKA
Her photography refers to a concept of a Doll of Hans Bellmer, combining the obscurity of
eroticism and sadism.
The imagery depicting person as a mannequin blurs the distinction between Human and
Nonhuman, Animate and Inanimate. The representation of still, passive, usually faceless and
fragmented figures provokes inventing of new desires, transgression.
Sophisticated mannequinisation – she calls the process of creating her art. The Body,
composed in an anonymous space, serves as an object of voyeuristic desires. Awaiting its
limitless anagrammatical recompositions imposed by the imagination of the Viewer.
She defines her aesthetics as the practice of Apathy. A promise of pleasure. Affirmation of
Boredom. The purpose is to explore the conjunction between the play of pain and the
phenomena of beauty.
Such conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty, she discerned at the age of 9, viewing Botticelli’s The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti exhibited in the Prado
Museum. The series of paintings recaunting a story from Decameron, present a scene of the
hunt in the pine forest – a young, naked woman being pursued by the dogs and chased by a
horseman with a sword. When the victim falls, the knight slits open her back and rips the
heart out to feed his dogs.
Contemplating the compulsive beauty of the Botticelli’s painting, was an initiation
determining her photography – environments populated by dollified human forms, shown with
the implied violence, like evidence of the morose fantasies.
The Viewer in relation to her art, could be metaphorically compared to the son of Aglaion
from the Plato’s Republic,
Leontius who coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside,
observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to
see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his
eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the
dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.1
1 Plato. Republic. Book IV.