Produced in collaboration with the Tomasz Machcinski Foundationthe artist’s first solo show at the christian berst art brut gallery presents some sixty self-portraits spanning five decades of her immense artistic practice, which until then had remained private. The artist’s entire life was lulled by the American dream and nourished by two powerful illusions that gave meaning to her life: the perpetual quest for true maternal love and the magic of the screen.
Machciński was born in 1942 in a small, war-torn Polish village. A rising Hollywood star, Joan Tompkins* saw a photograph of the bedridden child in a Red Cross catalogue listing war orphans available for long-distance adoption. She sent Tomasz a letter with one of her film stills, which she signed. With love to Tommy. Joan “Mom” Tompkins.
I did it all because of you — wrote the artist in one of the dozens of letters sent to the actress. The exhibition will be an opportunity to decipher this ambiguous relationship that transcended borders, decades and social classes.
*Joan Tompkins, born in New York in 1915, launched her acting career in 1935 on the Broadway stage, notably sharing the stage with Henry Fonda in White Plains. However, it was in the mid-1950s that she took an enduring place in the heart of American homes, playing numerous roles on television as the device flooded the market.
Tomasz Machciński 1942 — 2022
At a very young age, Tomasz Machciński built an identity around an autograph, which was addressed to him by an actress whom he then imagined to be his mother. From this confusion, which lasted more than twenty years, was born a protean and personal mythology that re-constructs the artist. A self-taught photographer and performer, his work is composed of multiple self-portraits of as many different physiognomies. Exhibited in 2019 at the Rencontres d’Arles, his works are part of the collections of the MAM in Warsaw and the Museum of Photography in Krakow. In 2023, he is exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Chrysalides: le rêve du papillon. Color and black and white self-portraits were presented at the Independent Art Fair in New York this year.
The loss of this supposed identity greatly influenced Machciński’s artistic work.
To date, his work includes more than 22,000 fictional or appropriated identities, of which only 1,500 are on the market, captured in photographic and cinematic self-portraits.
While he works as a mechanic in his spare time, the artist nonchalantly portrays big screen stars, pop culture icons and historical figures. His work depicts a variety of characters of different ethnic, sexual and social backgrounds. At the same time, these roles also become reinventions of his own identity.
“Instead of wigs or artifices, I show everything that happens to my body, such as: hair regrowth, tooth loss, diseases, aging processes, etc.” Machciński is a director and actor, makeup and costume designer, archivist, photographer and performance artist.
On the one hand, her artistic practice is linked to the history of European art by playing with traditional methods of representation and its conventions. On the other hand, it is part of the strategy of conceptual photography that uses the self-image as a theater of symbols and signs, also present in the works of Cindy Sherman or Luigi Ontani. Her photographs as well as her videos are performances made directly in front of the camera.
Tomasz Machciński has already established himself as a leading figure in raw photography, like Miroslav Tichy, Lee Godie, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who have only recently been recognized by the institutional art world. In 2018, the Tomasz Machciński Foundation was created and his films were screened the following year at the Whitechapel Gallery (London).
In 2020, he was exhibited at the American Folk Art Museum in New York and a major retrospective exhibition was also dedicated to him by Manggha (Krakow) in 2021. For its first participation in Paris Photo in 2021, the Christian Berst Art Brut gallery exhibited the work of Tomasz Machciński.
Curators: Katarzyna Karwańska and Zofia Płoska-Czartoryska
Tomasz Machcinski : american dream
I did it all because of you
from September 14 to November 10, 2024
christian berst art brut gallery
3-5 Pass. des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris, France
www.christianberst.com
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