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.