Aleksandra Waliszewska
born 1976 in Warsaw,
lives and works in Warsaw.
Her artistic practice embraces painting and drawing. Her works have been reproduced in many art magazines and appeared as covers of music albums. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film “The Capsule”, inspired by Waliszewska’s work, premiered in 2012 at Documenta in Kassel. Currently, the artist works mainly with small-scale gouaches.
The work of Aleksandra Waliszewska is shrouded in the spirit of horror and combines a fairy-tale atmosphere with anxiety. Frequent motifs in her art are apocalyptic scenes mainly with female characters who undergo torture and other forms of violence. They are usually set in empty spaces or in darkness, in the scenery of a mysterious abandoned world after a catastrophe. The series of presented works portray metamorphoses of female human characters into animals, plants insects or hybrids that resemble the creatures from old bestiaries or the dwellers of cabinets of curiosities. Waliszewska’s inspirations are often non contemporary. In the series of works in the exhibition, women-dogs and women-spiders appear against an unspecified background that suggests a void and emphasises isolation. “Painter of the Apocalypse” – as Waliszewska refers to herself – illustrates the chaos of a decaying world where norms and divisions between species have disappeared.
