ATHENS.- The Adam Mickiewicz Institute announced the exhibition Aleksandra Waliszewska: Irruption of Antiquity, organized by the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum and curated by Alison M. Gingeras. The exhibition opened on June 3, 2026, at the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens and will run through September 27, 2026.
Spanning two floors of the museum, the exhibition features sixteen paintings by Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska placed in charged iconographic tension with objects from Neolithic Greece, classical antiquity, the Byzantine world, and the modern Greek era. The exhibition pays homage to Greece as the birthplace of figurative and narrative art while tracing the enduring presence of antiquity within the contemporary visual imagination. Waliszewska’s psychologically intense tableaux manifest moments of "irruption”: the sudden return of ancient visual tropes into the present.
The exhibition takes its title from one of the most compelling sections of Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1928–29), conceived as a visual mapping of collective cultural memory through the recurrence of images across time. Mirroring Warburg’s transhistorical approach, Waliszewska’s paintings reveal the persistence of Greek culture in the present day. 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.
Irruption of Antiquity brings together the Benaki Museum’s heterogeneous collections and Waliszewska’s haunting pictorial universe to propose antiquity not as fixed heritage, but as a living reservoir of images and affects that persist, re-emerge, and refuse to remain historically contained.
Aleksandra Waliszewska is known for her dark, atmospheric paintings that are steeped in art historical erudition. Waliszewska, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, considers herself a contemporary heir to the Symbolist movement of the turn of the last century. Often allegorical in nature, her paintings probe the human condition as they grapple with primordial feelings of fear, anxiety, desire, and death. Coded references to the industrial landscapes of Poland, its primeval forests and swamps, as well as to specific national mythologies permeate her oeuvre and ground her work in Polish visual culture.
Alison M. Gingeras is a writer and curator. She serves as Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) and works independently. Over the past years, she has worked extensively on Aleksandra Waliszewska, notably co-curating her exhibitions The Dark Arts at MSN and at the National Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. In 2004, she was part of the DESTE Foundation’s curatorial team for the groundbreaking show, Monument to Now.
