2024
stained glass
120 x 45 cm each
Starting bid: 10 000 zł
Aleksandra Liput’s artistic practice centres on themes of spirituality and magical objects, drawing inspiration from ancient beliefs and folk tales. She is particularly interested in ideas connected to myth and utopia.
In Enchanting Eyes, the artist draws upon the folk belief in the so-called “evil eye,” a superstition once widespread across Polish lands. As Henryk Biegeleisen wrote, “(…) the evil eye brings misfortune to everything it gazes upon. If someone with such eyes looks at a beautiful child, the child quickly withers; if at a calf, it dies; if at a cottage, the family living there begins to quarrel (…).”
Enchanting Eyes explores the mechanisms of defence that give rise to superstitions surrounding illness. The red glass in the stained-glass panels symbolises the intensity of a gaze charged with the power of a curse. The work examines the thin line between genuine threat and irrational fear. As a medium that is both a physical barrier and a conduit for light, stained glass becomes an apt metaphor for superstition itself: meant to protect, yet often reinforcing exclusion and stigmatisation of those perceived as dangerous.
Aleksandra Liput (b. 1989) is a visual artist working across ceramics, textiles, and drawing to create sculptural objects and installations.
Liput currently serves as an assistant in the Drawing Studio at the Faculty of Painting, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2023, she earned her doctoral degree with the dissertation Today the Trees Outside the Window Looked Like Living Creatures on the Moon. Her works have been exhibited at institutions including the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Labirynt Gallery in Lublin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCAK in Kraków.
