Paris Photo
2021
For its first participation at Paris Photo, the gallery will exhibit (booth A9) the work of Tomasz Machciński.
Tomasz Machciński, a Polish mechanic born in 1942, produced some 22,000 photographic self-portraits over a period of almost half a century. When this war orphan was given, as a child, an ambiguous autograph by American actress Joan Tompkins, he imagined for twenty years that she was his mother. When reality caught up with him, the young Machcinski embarked on a frantic quest for identity, from 1966 – a decade before Cindy Sherman.
Discovered not long ago, his iconic works have been exhibited since 2019 at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles festival, in the “Photo brut” section, and are now part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Museum of Photography in Krakow (Poland). All the prints presented are unique.
Paris Photo will also organize a panel discussion on brut photography with Marc Donnadieu, Bruno Decharme, Corinne Rondeau and Christian Berst on Saturday, November 13 from 2 to 3 pm.
More information about the event : click here.
At a very young age, Tomasz Machciński built an identity around an autograph, addressed to him by an actress he believed to be his mother. From this confusion, which lasted more than twenty years, a protean and personal mythology was born that reconstructs the artist. Exhibited in 2019 at the Rencontres de la Photographie, his works are already part of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Museum of Photography in Krakow (Poland). In 2023, he is exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Chrysalides: le rêve du papillon. Color and black & white self-portraits will be shown at the Independent Art Fair in New York and in a solo show at the gallery in September 2024.