Afterbeauty & Votive Figure
Marta Zgierska
Marta Zgierska’s photographs have a gentle and clean look, both appealing and profoundly personal. To create her images, Zgierska’s point of departure and main source material is her own body and the memories of traumatic experiences it has undergone. Her performances, captured in photographs, take their inspiration from the codes of the cosmetics industry, and question the demands imposed on the female body in our society.
To create the self-portraits making up Afterbeauty, Zgierska put a series of beauty masks on her face. Each mask then became a cast of the shape of her face, which she photographed like abstract sculptures, or bodies emptied of their content. For the Votive Figure series, she first applied cosmetics to her body, and then covered it in wax, a material that evokes cosmetic products, but also purity and virginity. The photographs in pastel tones that result from this performance, in the course of which the wax solidified on her body like a corset, examine the paradoxical beauty of representations of the female body, a body often constrained or controlled.
Year of production: 2018 & 2019
In collaboration with Gowen Contemporary.
