Realized in collaboration with the Tomasz Machciński Foundation, the artist’s first solo show at the christian berst art brut gallery presents a hundred self-portraits spanning five decades of his immense artistic practice, which, until now, had remained private. The artist’s entire life has been shaped by the American dream and fueled by two powerful illusions that gave meaning to his life: the perpetual quest for true love and the magic of the screen.
Machciński was born in 1942 in a small Polish village torn by war. Rising Hollywood star Joan Tompkins* saw a photograph of this bedridden child in a Red Cross catalog listing war orphans available for remote adoption. She then sent a letter to Tomasz with one of her film photos, which she signed With love for Tommy. Joan “Mother” Tompkins.
I made it all because of you—the artist wrote in one of the dozens of letters sent to the actress. The exhibition will be an opportunity to decipher this improbable 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.
Tomasz Machciński (1942 — 2022)
Very young, Tomasz Machciński built an identity around an autograph addressed to him by an actress he imagined to be his mother. From this confusion, which lasted more than twenty years, a protean and personal mythology was born that reconstructed the artist. A self- taught photographer and performer, his work consists 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 Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Museum of Photography in Krakow. In 2023, he was exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Chrysalides: The Butterfly’s Dream. 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 oeuvre includes more than 22,000 fictitious or appropriated identities, of which only 1,500 are on the market, captured in photographic and cinematic self-portraits. Although he works as a mechanic in his spare time, the artist nonchalantly embodies movie stars, pop culture icons, and historical figures. His work depicts a variety of characters from 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, illnesses, aging processes, etc.”
Machciński is both director and actor, makeup artist and costume designer, archivist, photographer, and performance artist. On one hand, his artistic practice is connected to the history of European art by playing with traditional methods of representation and their conventions. On the other hand, it falls within the strategy of conceptual photography that uses self-image as a theater of symbols and signs, also present in the works of Cindy Sherman or Luigi Ontani. His photographs as well as his videos are performances realized directly in front of the camera.
Tomasz Machciński is already establishing himself as a prominent figure in brut art photography, like Miroslav Tichy, Lee Godie, and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who were only recently 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 the Manggha Museum (Krakow) in 2021.
Curators : Katarzyna Karwańska et Zofia Płoska-Czartoryska
Tomasz Machciński : american dream
I made it all because of you
from September 14 to November 10, 2024
galerie christian berst art brut
3-5 Pass. des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris, France
www.christianberst.com
