Aleksandra Liput

Visual artist, curator, co-founder of the Dzidy duo. Liput works mainly with ceramics and textiles, and creates objects and installations. Born in 1989 in Krosno, she lives and works in Warsaw.

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Aleksandra Liput, photo: Grzegorz Podsiadlik

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Aleksandra Liput studied art history at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków, as well as painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, eventually moving to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she defended her diploma in 2017 in the atelier of Andrzej Rysiński. She remained connected to the academy after her diploma – today she works at the Warsaw Academy as an assistant in the Drawing Studio at the Faculty of Painting.

In her early student works, Liput used primarily painting, only to expand her range of media over time and turn mainly towards ceramics. As a painter, she made it to the final of the Nowy Obraz / Nowe Spojrzenie competition in 2016, and her diploma project was awarded in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw’s Coming Out competition (now operating under the name OutComing).

Titled after the utopian island from Peter Pan (and Michael Jackson’s ranch), the graduation project Neverland consisted of works painted primarily in tempera and an object realised in the experimental fabric studio. Deformed and fragmented figures of child-dolls recur on the canvases, accompanied by a tentacle object made of black plush. Here, Liput retraces her childhood, but without falling into nostalgia, instead focusing on the anxiety that accompanies adolescence, that facet of exuberant childhood fantasy that gives rise to nightmares.

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'Plagued Air' by Aleksandra Liput, 2022, installation made of porcelain, ceramics, metal and earth, photo: meta_strong_fiction

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The artist’s next project, also primarily painting, complemented by plush sculptures, was to some extent a continuation of her diploma. For in #Behappyalways, Liput focused on the fears and traumas experienced during the teenage years, and above all on the normative models of masculinity and femininity already imposed during adolescence. Normative visions of masculinity, in particular, are exaggerated and parodied here, with male figures caricatured in their flexing of muscles and exposure of their appendages.

They combine various types of pictograms, from Palaeolithic art to Internet emojis, which are, as the artist said, ‘a universal code known to all smartphone users, as prevalent among modern people as symbols of fertility and prosperity in prehistoric times’. Simple pictograms are combined with ‘girly’ decorations in the form of plastic ‘crystals’ shaped like hearts or flowers, contrasting with an expressive painting convention close to the works of Stach Szumski and Jakub Gliński, drawing on the aesthetics of amateur graffiti. Liput’s paintings, however, are more ‘structured’ than Szumski’s psychedelic visions and Gliński’s free compositions. The painter seems to catalogue individual forms, the compositions are closed, rhythmic and planar.

From 2019 onwards, Liput’s work increasingly manifests an interest in spirituality, magical themes, ancient beliefs, myths and stories. At the same time, the place of painting is taken by the artist’s increasing use of ceramics, often woven into larger scenographic installations in combination with other materials – from flowers and branches to silica cat litter. It is no coincidence that Liput became one of several protagonists in the exhibition Return to Ceramics at MOCAK in Kraków in 2023.

The retreat from post-Enlightenment rationalism and the search for support in nature, reconstructed or imagined ancient beliefs, fascination with the supernatural, the magical, the fairy-tale and the psychedelic are part of the attempts to ‘re-enchant’ the world seen in recent years in the art of practically all continents. In Central Europe, they have been explored particularly intensively on the Czech scene by artists such as Nela Britaňáková, Veronika Čechmánková, Anna Slama and Marek Delong.

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'DIY Totems' by Aleksandra Liput, 2019, installation made of textiles, chains, mountain crystals & plastic, photo: Bartosz Górka

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The first work heralding the new direction of Liput’s artistic explorations is DIY Totems, objects in the shape of a snake, a heart, a hand and a dreamcatcher. ‘The key theme of this installation is the phenomenon of inherited traumas, the effects of which are strongly felt in our society’, – said the artist in an interview with Kaja Werbanowska. The dreamcatcher motif returned in Liput’s next project, Astral Insects Catchers. As the artist said:

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I began to wonder how it came about that the amulet, an essential part of Native American beliefs, became a popular design element, a kind of instant ethnic accessory. I thought that the nightmarish dreams, which the amulet was originally meant to protect against, were not the only threat lurking in humanity today. I wanted to create talismans that are a contemporary interpretation of the dreamcatcher from found objects, chains and sewn forms.

In this project, Liput also reached for ceramics for the first time. Like Agnieszka Brzeżańska, who paved the way for a ‘renaissance’ of this medium among younger generations of Polish artists, Liput creates forms in ceramics on the borderline of sculpture and utilitarian objects – various kinds of vessels, vases and bowls. At other times, sculptural installations using ceramics seem to suggest a not entirely clear ritual purpose. In the projects that followed Astral Insects Catchers, the artist moved away from exploring motifs associated with a specific culture, avoiding the risk of cultural appropriation. Dreamcatchers are replaced by abstract-organic forms reminiscent of amulets and totems, intentionally timeless, which can evoke associations with pre-Christian cultures as much as with visions of a post-anthropocentric future.

Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, which signifies a turn from utopian imaginings of the future to a vision of the past as paradise lost, was taken up directly by the artist in the project Today, Outside the Window, the Trees Looked Like Living Creatures on the Moon, held at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin in 2022. With a title taken from Allen Ginsberg’s poem The Trembling of the Veil, the exhibition transformed the interior of the gallery, in an old 15th-century townhouse, into a setting filled with traces left by an undefined, mysterious tribe. It consisted of rickety huts made of debarked branches of the lime tree (chosen for its protective and healing symbolism in many cultures), on the tops of which spiked ceramic forms resembling totems or arrowheads were found. Ceramic amulets, in forms evoking heraldic associations, hung on the walls and stood throughout the space, alongside a sculpture of a forest spirit surrounded by a circle of dried flowers and soft sculpture-cocoons made of wool and silk.

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'Today, the Trees Outside the Window Looked Like Living Beings on the Moon' by Aleksandra Liput, 2021-22, installation made of linden sticks, ceramics, metal, photo: Kuba Mozolewski

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While the Lublin exhibition presented a seductive rather than disturbing vision of a non-anthropocentric world, Foul Air, realised a few months later at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, in the space of a former palace chapel, referred to feelings accompanying crises such as a pandemic, which can increase interest in magical rituals, on the one hand, and on the other, generating the need to search for scapegoats. In a chapel space flooded with ominous red light, the artist placed ceramic objects in the form of a jaw with a double row of teeth, or a double heart, alluding to the ways of recognising the titular wraiths in ancient beliefs described by, among others, Łukasz Kozak in The Wraith. As Weronika Elertowska, curator of the exhibition, wrote: ‘on the one hand, the works allude to heraldry indicating the approaching foul air, while on the other hand, they make use of symbols that served to counteract the appearance of the plague and chase away the wraith.’ The latter include flowers of rue, a plant used as an antidote for numerous ailments, carved from steel.

Anxiety, Liput’s primary subject since her graduation, still plays first violin here, only now in a different guise. Instead of the fears and traumas associated with adolescence, over time the artist has turned to more universal fears, sometimes embedded in specific events, such as a pandemic, at other times associated with an undefined sense of impending disaster and the fragility of civilisation.

Since 2018, Liput has also co-founded the curatorial duo Dzidy with Michalina Sablik. It operates independently of any specific institution – some of Liput and Sablik’s projects to date have been exhibitions realised in collaboration with galleries, such as the municipal Galeria Promocyjna in Warsaw and the independent Jak Zapomnieć in Kraków. Meanwhile, others have been projects in specific non-gallery spaces – in the garden of a house in Warsaw’s Mokotów district or the abandoned building of the former Ambasador restaurant on Aleje Ujazdowskie.

Selected Works by Aleksandra Liput – Image Gallery

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Selected solo exhibitions:

2022 – Today, Outside the Window, the Trees Looked like Living Creatures on the Moon, Labirynt Gallery, Lublin

2022 – Foul Air, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko

2020 – Astral Data Transmission, Baszta Gallery, Kraków

2019 – Astral Insects Catchers, Spectra Art Space, Warsaw

2018 – #Behappyalways, Aleje Ujazdowskie, Warsaw

2017 – Neverland, Galeria Bardzo Biała, Warsaw

2016 – Sand at Heart, Galeria Bardzo Biała, Warsaw

Selected group exhibitions:

2023 – Return to Ceramics, MOCAK, Kraków

2022 – Anxiety comes at dusk, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw

2022 – Interior, Gallery of Contemporary Art BWA in Katowice

2021 – The Setting Sun Is Blue Here, Jak Zapomnieć, Kraków

2021 – Les Danses Nocturnes, Spread Museum, Entrevaux, France

2021 – Salon of Magical Renewal, Widna, Kraków

2021 – Pure Crystal, Promocyjna Gallery, Warsaw

2020 – Effects of the Pandemic: Dreams, Serce Człowieka, Warsaw

2019 – Three Plagues, Labirynt Gallery, Lublin

2019 – What do you do?, Salon Akademii, Warsaw

2017 – Coming Out: The Best Diplomas of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Reduta Banku Polskiego, Warsaw

2016 – Krew-werk, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

2016 – No Budget Show, Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw