Aleksandra Waliszewska

Untitled, 2011

Untitled, 2012

Balustrada, 2012

Untitled, 2012

Aleksandra Waliszewska is a Polish artist living and working in Warsaw.  I found out about her work via this post on Monster Brains three years ago, and I've thought about her work about once a week ever since then.  Her works in gouache (on paper, I believe) are stylistically rough -- pencil marks and slivers of white show through the paint.  This seems utterly appropriate, though, as I imagine her waking up from the middle of a dream and jotting the scene down on paper before all of its subtleties and weird atmospheric details escape her, then perhaps getting back under the covers and waiting to complete another sleep cycle so she can get up and do it all over again (she claims to produce about two of these per day).  That's all conjecture on my part, but these do look like the sorts of things that can only be accessed by dreaming and subconscious thought, don't they?  Things that show up often in Waliszewska's paintings include friendly goats, bleeding girls, flesh-eating monsters, faces melting and broken out in boils, and massive cats and spiders that appear to be up to no good.  I'll let you decide for yourself whether her works are disturbing, but it's hard to deny they're intriguing at the very least.

Aleksandra keeps a Blog, a Flickr, and a Tumblr, but I recommend visiting her Tumblr account here as she seems to update it more frequently than the others.

Jin Minwook (진민욱)

Boundaries, painting on silk, 90x129 cm, 2012

Boundary Between Dream and Reality (installation view), painting on silk, 118x141x4cm, 2011-2012

No information was listed for this piece on the artist's webpage,

and I don't recall the title, but it was one of my absolute favorites.

Sweet!  I think I may be the first to write about Jin Minwook in English, which means a lot of you will be seeing something new here.

After finishing up a teaching contract in Busan, South Korea, I decided to devote a week to exploring Seoul.  I went to about twenty galleries during that time, and while I discovered a lot of fantastic work there, Jin Minwook's work at Gallery Dam touched on some of my favorite themes: monsters, fauna, and psychology.

In her work, Jin focuses on the emotional struggle of the individual in the midst of a rapidly changing society.  Since the Korean War, South Korea has rapidly grown into an industrialized nation with a powerful economy and strong ties to the west.  But industrialization brings with it an obsession with wealth and individualism, not to mention isolation due to its tendency to move people from smaller communities to large urban centers where connecting with others is not generally a priority.  Korean society is still struggling to adjust to these new dynamics, and Jin's work bears witness to this through its imagery of tangled snakes and many-headed dogs struggling amongst  themselves in barren landscapes.  The human psyche behaves in much the same way -- in a social landscape devoid of interpersonal connections and support, it warps and turns against itself, leading to inner struggles in the form of mental malaise and a fractured sense of self.

Critical analysis aside, Jin's paintings on silk panels are amazing fun to look at, with their lush variations in color and hue and careful attention to textural detail.  They simultaneously recall the centuries-old tradition of silk painting in Korea and the European/North American style of zoological illustration that thrived throughout the 18th century.  I really wish her the greatest success, if only for the selfish reason that I would relish the opportunity to see her work again here in the United States!

Jin Minwook was born in Seoul in 1980, and received a BA in painting at Ewha Women's University in 2003.  She went on to receive her MFA at The China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2009.  She's currently working towards her PhD at Ewha Women's University.

Note: I realize that the images above are way too small, but these were the best I was able to find online.  I will do my best to find some high-resolution images of Jin's work in the near future.

Welcome to Vicar!

I'll be using this blog to introduce you to artists from a different country every week.  Some will be up-and-coming, some will be widely known, but ultimately my goal is to introduce somebody, somewhere to something new.

I've only set foot in three distinct countries myself, and I've had to put international travel on the back burner while looking for work in my home country.  I've been reading the news mags and keeping up on current events, but it doesn't feel like enough.  So I've also made it my goal to gain a better understanding of the world through art, and I hope you can gain something from my efforts as well.

All that aside, I'm an aspiring curator and thought that the blogosphere might not be a bad place to get my start.  It's been a bit more than a year since I've written critically about art, so bear with me in that regard.  If you give me some space, I promise I'll do great things!

Lauren