Irruption of Antiquity: Aleksandra Waliszewska

The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture presents Irruption of Antiquity, a fascinating transhistorical exhibition that merges the museum's rich, historical collections with the haunting pictorial universe of contemporary Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska. Unfolding across two floors of the museum, fifteen of Waliszewska’s intense paintings are placed in a charged iconographic dialogue with objects spanning Neolithic Greece, Classical Antiquity, the Byzantine world, and the modern Greek era. Curated by Alison Gingeras, this unique showcase pays homage to Greece as the birthplace of narrative art while tracing its powerful, psychological footprint in the modern world.

Rather than treating antiquity as a stagnant heritage confined to textbooks, the exhibition frames it as an active, unsettling psychological pressure. Waliszewska's dark, striking tableaux manifest moments of "irruption", the sudden, forceful entry of ancient visual tropes into the present day. Within her work, ancient gods, myths, and religious figures surface not as distant historical remnants, but as unstable, gripping forces that persist, re-emerge, and actively disrupt contemporary visual consciousness.