From 3 February, Kaunas residents can see the exhibition ‘The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and the Symbolism from the East and North’. Thus, the highly acclaimed exhibition ‘Cruel Tales’ at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art will get a Lithuanian version. The exhibition will include more than 200 works by 36 artists from Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic States from the 19th century to the present. The main axis of the exhibition is the works of Aleksandra Waliszewska.

The artist creates bold paintings that have many admirers from alternative and pop cultures. Her works have appeared on the covers of music albums, and she has also illustrated a book with lyrics by the world-famous singer Nick Cave.

According to the exhibition materials, the presented paintings show the artist’s work in dialogue with symbolists from Poland, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, who are absent in the Western canon. The exhibition will feature Waliszewska’s fairy-tale motifs, apocalyptic scenarios and Balto-Slavic landscapes imbued with significance as swamps, dark forest backwoods, lost highways and gloomy suburbs. The warp of the artist’s visual stories is metaphor, which refers to primal emotions – love, desire, anxiety and fear of death. Waliszewska perversely, symbolically depicts primordial emotions, the fragility of matter, anxieties and events of life, exclusion and persecution.

The exhibition ‘The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and the Symbolism from the East and North’ will last until 22 May. It is co-organised by the M. K. Čiurlionis Museum and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in partnership with the Polish Institute in Vilnius, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Kaunas Cinema Center “Romuva”.

Adrian Andrzejewski