Goshka Macuga

Goshka Macuga is a Polish-born contemporary artist, born in Warsaw in 1967, who has lived and worked in London since 1989. She studied at the Wojciech Gerson School of Art in Warsaw, Central Saint Martins in London, and Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2008, she was one of four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Macuga’s practice combines artistic research, archival investigation, and exhibition-making to examine how historical and political narratives are constructed, mediated, and displayed. Working across large-scale tapestries, sculpture, installation, collage, photography, and robotics, she frequently develops site-specific projects based on extensive research into the histories and archives of their host institutions. Her installations bring together archival documents, found objects, works by other artists, and her own compositions, complicating conventional distinctions between the roles of artist, curator, collector, and historian. Among her best-known projects is The Nature of the Beast (2009–2010), commissioned for the reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The installation centred on a tapestry based on Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955 and normally displayed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Macuga placed it within an environment recalling a conference room, connecting the political history of Picasso’s painting with contemporary debates about war, censorship, and the institutional use of images. For documenta 13 in 2012, Macuga created the two-part tapestry Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not, with complementary sections presented in Kassel and Kabul. The work established a symbolic connection between the two locations and examined how political events, cultural exchange, and collective memory are interpreted differently according to their context. Her practice repeatedly questions claims to historical truth, emphasising the role that institutions, display strategies, and systems of representation play in shaping knowledge. Macuga has presented solo exhibitions and commissions at institutions including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Fondazione Prada in Milan. She has also participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the São Paulo Biennial, and documenta 13. In December 2023, she was elected a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in London.