Aleksandra Waliszewska: Irruption Of Antiquity

Unfolding across two floors of the Benaki Museum, fifteen of the contemporary Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska’s paintings are placed in charged iconographic tension with objects spanning Neolithic Greece, classical antiquity, the Byzantine world, and the modern Greek era. The exhibition pays homage to Greece as the birthplace of figurative, narrative art and as a foundation of Western visual culture—while also tracing its enduring presence in the visual imagination today. Waliszewska’s intense psychological tableaux manifest moments of “irruption”: the sudden, forceful entry of ancient visual tropes into the present. One of art history’s most tantalizing unfinished projects, and Aby Warburg’s magnum opus, the Mnemosyne Atlas was begun in 1928 and remained incomplete upon Warburg’s untimely death in 1929. Named for the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne was conceived as a pictorial atlas. Warburg organized it into twelve thematic chapters to trace the Renaissance’s roots in the classical cultures of Greece and Rome. Through a vast iconographic analysis—ultimately comprising more than a thousand images—Warburg aspired to create a map of collective cultural memory without words. Mirroring the art historical models Warburg imagined, Waliszewska’s paintings testify to the longue durée of Greek culture in the present. Ancient gods, myths, symbols, and religious figures surface within her haunting pictorial universe not as remnants of a distant past, but as unstable, often disturbing forces that continue to shape contemporary visual consciousness. In this sense, Irruption of Antiquity proposes antiquity not as heritage, but as pressure: a reservoir of images and affects that persist, re-emerge, and refuse to remain historically contained. “Irruption of Antiquity” is among Warburg’s most intriguing chapters and serves as an apt title for a transhistorical exhibition that brings together the Benaki Museum’s rich, heterogeneous collections and the pictorial universe of Aleksandra Waliszewska. Read more Toggle Painting