Every fairy tale has a forest you have to run through and something that runs after you. Here, between black trunks, a group of naked women with fair hair races to the right, their bodies covered in red marks, one looking back over her shoulder, another half hidden by a tree. Aleksandra Waliszewska has said that women attacked by monsters have interested her since childhood. There is no monster in this painting. All you can see is that they know where it is.
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.