Grzegorz Marszałek’s works reference the face transplant — one of the
most difficult medical procedures. The works were created after his
return from Paris, where the artist, as a holder of a French government
scholarship, studied at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.
In one of them, a glove is the tissue of the new face of a man who underwent
a transplant, and the effect resembles a dog’s head. In the second work,
the transplant led to the modelling of a man’s face from two different halves.
Both these hybrid depictions of the body, combining elements of various
orders, take up the problem of identity, of how people perceive themselves
and how they want to be perceived by others. The theme of the self-portrait
here refers in a universal way to the imagining and representation of oneself
by others, the creation of new images and thus the departure from the old
identity, ‘fixed’ by time and memory. ‘There is no escape from the mug,
other than into another mug’, Witold Gombrowicz wrote in Ferdydurke.
This quotation, in reference to Marszałek’s Transplantations illustrates
the mechanism of acquiring a new ‘self’.

Michał Jachuła