I keep a private ranking of cat activities in Waliszewska's paintings. Third place, cats taking part in rituals. Second, cats taking part in battles. First, and by some distance, cats smoking cigarettes. It is a dark world, folkloric and dreamlike, with death never far off. Six hundred years ago Piero della Francesca painted figures like statues, both male and female at once, and said everything he wanted with light, shadow and colour alone. Waliszewska can do that too.
The painter
Aleksandra Waliszewska (born 1976) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her dark, folkloric, dreamlike scenes, full of cats, monsters and women caught somewhere between ritual and death, have won her a cult that reaches well beyond the art world into music and fashion. Recent solo shows include Lévy Gorvy Dayan in London and the Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw.