Bank Pekao PROJECT ROOM Aleksandra Waliszewska Nasty Child
April 24 – May, 6, 2012 Inauguration of the project: April 23, 2012, 6 pm Bank Pekao PROJECT ROOM
The Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (CCA) and Poland's Pekao S.A. Bank have come together to launch a new project aimed at supporting and promoting young artists. For the next two years starting 23 April the CCA hosts a new show ever two weeks featuring up-and-coming Polish and international artists. The presentation of striking works by this young creative generation in the PROJECT ROOM has been made possible by the financial support of Pekao S.A. Bank. Pekao Bank's PROJECT ROOM aims to forge a platform for a discussion on contemporary art, inviting artists, curators, students and art enthusiasts to join in. Entry is free for all exhibitions and events within the Pekao Bank Project Room framework. Nasty child, the title of Aleksandra Waliszewska’s exhibition has been taken from the nearly forgotten biographical novel Dwadzieścia lat życia (Twenty years of life) by Zbigniew Uniłowski (1937). Aleksandra Waliszewska paints every day for five hours, always in the daylight. This part of the day is devoted to intense work, but also to pleasure, as she always paints what she likes the most. She does not waste time waiting for inspiration – if the paining vision is not precise enough, the artist creates new versions of her self-portrait. What is important in such moments is to be on your own with yourself, with your imagination and impressions stored in your memory – in order to set fantasy free and capture the ideas streaming out of it, to establish new relations between different states of sensitivity and their form on paper, or simply in order to obtain satisfaction from painting an imaginary picture. As an artist with a masterful painting workshop, Waliszewska always manages to formally restrain any overabundance of phantasmagoria, thus skilfully perfecting the composition and colouring of every gouache. Among numerous gouaches by Aleksandra Waliszewska it is easy to find the ones which could be used as illustrations for Gothic fiction. However, their gloomy atmosphere and bizarre forms born out of the imagination of the person with a gift for creating such structures seem to be much more complex. Waliszewska creates her paintings in order to bring to daylight and expose certain emotional states, to activate various layers of sensitivity, or to quiet down anxieties and fears. The artist’s fascinations revolve around the dark side where it is easy to succumb to a momentary madness, where the macabre meets the grotesque, whereby beauty is accompanied by horror. The viewer enters the world created by Waliszewska and encounters the intricate and complex mixture of meanings the key to which has been carefully hidden. Thus, the viewers need to look for their own traces, following the tips provided by their subconsciousness, their instinct for tracking sometimes very distant associations, and afterimages of pictures stemming from the unlimited repository of visual culture. Waliszewska likes horror films, Japanese comic books, the aesthetics of heavy metal CD covers. She also admires the old masters of arts, among others Hans Memling, Enguerrand Quarton, early Renaissance painters or Nicolas Poussin. Moreover, she made a whole series of works inspired by etchings by Jan Ziarnko, Polish etcher, author of illustrations among others for the Apocalypse, who at the beginning of the 17th century lived and worked in France. Occasionally Waliszewska focuses on a more contemporary topic – for example her series of gouaches entitled Norway was inspired by the Utoya massacre.
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