Aleksandra Waliszewska

"Through my imagination, I see gazillions of happy human beings, people, and lambs and tigers embracing in an endless dance of happiness. My art, by forewarning of possible evils, will only make happiness come earlier."

—Aleksandra Waliszewska

Fortnight Institute is pleased to present a presentation of mixed media works by Warsaw-based artist Aleksandra Waliszewska (b.1976 Warsaw, Poland). For her forthcoming book, Gold Hands Tremble, Warren Ellis writes that in Waliszewska’s work, he feels the “reverberations of Henry Darger, Francisco Goya, the framing of Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom, the classical composition of Pierro Della Francesca, blending the sacred and profane, and sublime counterpoint. But the result is a pure vision, uniquely hers, divinely inhabited.”

Poland has always had a fickle history with Surrealism—even before the Second World War, most members of the avant-garde shied away from this language with the exception of a small circle of artists that later congealed around the Krakow Group. While her work might seem indebted to Western illustration, Aleksandra Waliszewska seems to carry the torch of this tortured allegiance to Polish Surrealism. Like the figurative works of Erna Rosenstein—herself a lone champion of Surrealism even in the Stalinist period— Waliszewska merges trauma with fairytale and dreamscape. Her protagonists are almost always female and often pictured engaged in some sort of struggle: emotional, physical, psychic—again, echoing another unsung Polish Surrealist Maria Anto.

—Alison Gingeras