Tomasz Machcinski

Tomasz Machcinski - untitled (unique print)

Artist Biography: Tomasz Machcinski, born in 1942 in Poland, is a self-taught photographer and performer. As a war orphan, he received an autographed card from Hollywood actress Joan Tompkins with the words "With love for 'Tommy' from 'Mother' Joan" as part of a long-distance adoption program. For the first twenty years of his life, he was convinced that Tompkins was his mother. The end of his "American dream" and the loss of this supposed identity influenced his artistic work. To date, his work consists of more than 22,000 fictional or appropriated identities, captured in both photographic self-portraits and film. In his staging, the artist casually embodies screen stars, pop culture icons, historical, literary and political figures, and other eccentric characters. His work depicts a variety of characters from different ethnic, sexual, or social affiliations.

At the same time, these characters are also reinvestments of her own identity. "Instead of wigs or gimmicks, I show everything that happens to my body, such as: hair growth, tooth loss, diseases, aging processes, etc." By alternately revealing and concealing her body's weaknesses, she gives it new meaning. In his work, Machcinski serves as director and actor, makeup and costume designer, archivist, photographer and performance artist at the same time. On the one hand, his artistic practice is related to European art history through playing with traditional methods of representation and their conventions. However, on the other hand, it goes hand in hand with the strategy of conceptual photography that uses the self-image as a vehicle to negotiate different meanings, also present in works by Cindy Sherman or Luigi Ontani. Her photographs, as well as videos, are performances made directly to the camera.

Tomasz Machcinski is already established as a leading figure in brut photography, like Miroslav Tichy, Lee Godie, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who have recently been recognized by the institutional art world.

In the year following the establishment, in 2018, of the Tomasz Machcinski Foundation, his films were screened at the Whitechapel Gallery (London); the same year he participated in Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles) in the exhibition PHOTO l BRUT, collection Bruno Decharme and company. In 2020, he was exhibited at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and finally a major retrospective exhibition will be dedicated to him by the Manggha (Krakow) from May to September 2021.

The artist passed away in January 2022 at the age of 79.