The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) is hosting an exhibition of works by Aleksandra Waliszewska, one of the most popular, most prolific and – paradoxically – least discussed Polish artists. The exhibition ‘Cruel Tales. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North’ is the first such wide-ranging presentation of her oeuvres.

The painter reaches out to a wide variety of sources – gothic novels, pagan mythologies or motifs borrowed from medieval manuscripts. Blood-thirsty wraiths, vampires, possessed girls, female knights on horseback and cats assuming human characteristics can be found here.

The images on display at MSN are mostly familiar to the artist’s fans from her publications or social media profiles. Waliszewska was one of the artists who earliest and most intensely used social media to regularly engage with her audiences, posting photographs of her latest works on a regular basis.

Not only is Waliszewska keen to move beyond the elitist gallery-museum circulation, but she also has no problem with gadgetising her art – turning fragments of her works into patterns on tights or plates. Motifs from her paintings in the form of tattoos have found their way onto the arms of a multitude of people, and her depictions of mermaids with long, eel-like bodies inspired the film Daughters of Dancing, directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska.

In the exhibition, Waliszewska’s work is juxtaposed with the works of other artists from Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries. This provides a broad perspective on the fairytale motifs, apocalyptic scenarios and Baltoslavic landscapes permeated with meaning that occupy the artist: forests and swamps, lost highways, gloomy suburbs. Waliszewska’s works seem to be governed by the logic of dreams, and the means of imagery is metaphor, which refers to primal emotions: love, desire and fear of death.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński