What does antiquity mean to a contemporary artist?

For many, it exists as history—preserved in museums, admired from a respectful distance and encountered through archaeological remains. Aleksandra Waliszewska: Irruption of Antiquity at the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens proposes something far more ambitious. Rather than presenting antiquity as a completed civilisation, the exhibition demonstrates that its visual language continues to evolve, resurfacing within contemporary painting in surprising and often unsettling ways.

Presented by the DESTE Foundation in partnership with the Benaki Museum and curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the exhibition unfolds across two floors of the museum. Sixteen paintings by Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska are placed among objects spanning Neolithic Greece, Classical Antiquity, Byzantium and the modern Greek era. Rather than illustrating history, the exhibition creates conversations across more than two thousand years of visual culture.

Antiquity as Living Memory

The exhibition borrows its title from one of the unfinished chapters of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.

An “irruption” is not a quotation from history but a sudden reappearance. Ancient images do not disappear; they return, often transformed, carrying new meanings while preserving traces of their original symbolic power.

Throughout the exhibition, Waliszewska’s paintings repeatedly demonstrate that mythology, religion, folklore and classical civilisation remain living visual languages rather than historical artefacts.

The Byzantine Lamentation

One of the exhibition’s most moving juxtapositions pairs a Byzantine epitaphios—an embroidered liturgical shroud depicting the Lamentation of Christ—with one of Waliszewska’s paintings.

Although the textile has lost much of its original colour, Gingeras explains that it would once have been carried during Good Friday processions. She remarked that the object “just screamed out” to be paired with Waliszewska’s painting.

Both works depict lamentation.

Yet while the Byzantine embroidery centres upon Christ, Waliszewska replaces him with an enigmatic golden figure—perhaps a doll, perhaps a goddess, perhaps simply a young woman. Behind her stand mourners recalling apostles, while another figure prepares to cover her with a shroud.

Christian iconography survives, but within Waliszewska’s world it becomes psychological rather than devotional.

El Greco and Hammershøi

Historical references emerge elsewhere in equally unexpected ways.

Gingeras points to Waliszewska’s elongated hands as clear echoes of El Greco’s mannerist figures. At the same time, one quiet interior becomes a direct homage to the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose haunting empty rooms remain among the masterpieces of European Symbolism.

Waliszewska adopts Hammershøi’s silent architecture while replacing its stillness with psychological unease.

The result feels simultaneously familiar and deeply unsettling.

The Warsaw Mermaid

The exhibition’s dialogue with mythology continues through one of Waliszewska’s mermaids.

Rather than presenting a conventional mythical creature, the artist draws upon the legend of the Warsaw Mermaid, whose union with the fisherman Wars gave birth to the city itself.

Gingeras explains that Waliszewska’s version embodies both vulnerability and power.
Her hands become strange claw-like appendages while sailors loom behind her, transforming the familiar legend into an ambiguous psychological drama balanced between desire, danger and mortality.

Ancient Coins and Lost Civilisations

One painting depicts prehistoric cave dwellers gazing towards an ancient Athenian coin bearing the famous owl of Athena.

Its meaning deliberately remains unresolved.

Is the coin an apparition from the future—a vision of civilisation, knowledge and culture? Or is it a relic discovered after the collapse of humanity?

Gingeras also reveals the work’s autobiographical dimension. Waliszewska’s partner, Ignacy, is a passionate self-taught scholar of antiquity and collector of ancient coins, allowing fragments of personal life quietly to enter the artist’s broader mythology.

Mityusha and the Danse Macabre

Perhaps the exhibition’s most intimate work depicts Mityusha, Waliszewska’s beloved white cat, painted shortly after its death.

The cat appears frequently throughout her paintings—sometimes mischievous, sometimes sinister—but here becomes the subject of quiet mourning.

Behind the animal, dancing skeletons evoke the medieval Danse Macabre, reminding viewers that death remains the great universal equaliser.

Gingeras notes that this tradition itself ultimately derives from much older Greek processional imagery, revealing yet another unexpected bridge between antiquity and contemporary painting.

Neoclassicism Reimagined

Another painting shifts attention towards the long afterlife of antiquity within European culture.

Set before a Polish manor house inspired by classical architecture, the composition reflects how ancient Greece continued to shape aristocratic taste throughout Europe.

Gingeras draws comparisons with Lord Byron and the remarkable collections of Sir John Soane, whose London house became one of the greatest monuments to the neoclassical imagination.

Yet Waliszewska simultaneously disrupts this orderly world with mysterious figures emerging from darkness, suggesting that beneath the idealised classical landscape something ancient—and perhaps terrifying—continues to survive.

Transformation and Mortality

Themes of bodily transformation recur throughout the exhibition.

One sculptural relief depicts a flayed woman whose skin appears to dissolve as double-headed snakes emerge around her.

Displayed beside an Ottoman chest decorated with horsemen, the work forms another conversation between historical decorative arts and Waliszewska’s contemporary mythology.

Life and death, beauty and violence remain inseparable.

A Living Antiquity

What makes Irruption of Antiquity exceptional is that it never treats antiquity as something complete or distant.

Instead, Alison M. Gingeras demonstrates that ancient Greece, Byzantium, medieval Christianity, folklore and nineteenth-century Romanticism all remain part of a single visual continuum.

Aleksandra Waliszewska does not imitate the past.

She absorbs it, transforms it and returns it to us in forms that feel simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary.

The exhibition ultimately reminds us that antiquity is not merely something preserved within museums.

It continues to shape the way we imagine fear, memory, mythology, desire and the human condition itself.