Aleksandra Waliszewska: Irruption of Antiquity

Ancient Greek art, archeology and artifacts invoke both the ritual and the mythological in Waliszewska's paintings

The totemic, symbolist paintings of Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska (born 1976) can be viewed as engaging in a specific kind of irruption: the sudden, forceful entry of ancient visual tropes into the present. The 15 works featured in Irruption of Antiquity are testament to this anachronistic intermixing of modern aesthetics with classical imagery, specifically that of ancient Greek art and mythology. Serving as both documentation and extension of the exhibition installed across two floors of Athens' Benaki Museum, this book collects writings by the exhibition's curator, Alison Gingeras, who probes the charged iconographic tensions between objects spanning Neolithic Greece, classical antiquity, the Byzantine world and the modern Greek era, and Waliszewska's intense psychological tableaux.