Waliszewska doesn't paint or draw for a particular project or exhibition. She takes a methodical approach to her task and doesn't wait for inspiration to strike, working for 5 hours a day and making up to two works a day. On days of lukewarm inspiration, she tends to stick to portraits. With her more intricate scenes, she says the narrative tends to unfold on its own, rooted in a strong wave of emotion - most often a dark, brooding emotion. Her subjects have an primitive, androgynous air - a young woman's waif-like body could easily be that of a nubile adolescent male. The worlds of fairy tales and S&M collide, creating a sort of magical perversion that is both intriguing and disconcerting.
In recent years, she has strayed from the canvas back to the technique she had begun with as a girl – gouache on paper. Since then, she's been painting at least one picture a day, which adds up to a total of 2000 works. The subject matter of her paintings has also changed: All the references to Mannerism have disappeared, and in their place are disturbing, sometimes even macabre visions, as if taken out of a small girl's nightmare.
The new works are in a way a return to what I did as a child. (…) Women bound and attacked by monsters have been an interest of mine from a young age. The oil paintings were an attempt to prove to myself that I can paint large, serious paintings. Now I'm back to what attracts me the most.
Aleksandra Waliszewska, Tortures, 2011, goache, Courtesy of Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski As she said herself,painting small girls in oppressive situations makes her happy. The gouache paintings are perverse fairy-tales, where the idyllic games of tiny heroines blend with sophisticated horrors and everything is interwoven with a strong eroticism. Wild animals and scary monsters enter into relationships with girls – objects of dark, sexual fantasies. These little women can sometimes be victims, but other times they're the initiators of violence; girlish innocence intertwines with something demonic and repulsive. The gouache painting entitled The Death of a Paedophile depicts a girl standing, her legs straddling a man's head that emerges from the ground; in another picture, a girl with pigtails eagerly drinks from a bottle filled with a red liquid that resembles blood and it drips down her chin and stains her blouse.
In Waliszewska's latest works, one can find references to actual traumaas well asscenes from horror and vampire movies.The paintings include numerous archetypical images that resemble something from a mediaeval bestiary. These references are amplified with contemporary sources of inspiration, such as computer games, images taken from the Internet and comic books. This fantastic diversity is bound with Waliszewska's artistic individuality, her emotions, experiences and extraordinary sensitivity
In 2012 Waliszewska was awarded the EXIT award given by the art magazine of the same name to the most intriguing artist on their radar. That year she presented Nasty Child at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw (CSW) as part of the Project Room series promoting young artists. CSW Curator Ewa Gorządek likened her work to illustrations of Gothic fiction, yet she adds that these paintings are highly sensitive and emotional, explaining, "The artist’s fascinations revolve around the dark side where it is easy to succumb to a momentary madness, where the macabre meets the grotesque, whereby beauty is accompanied by horror. The viewer enters the world created by Waliszewska and encounters the intricate and complex mixture of meanings, the key to which has been carefully hidden".
