After some time, HIDDEN returns to showcasing international artists with the exhibition Spellbound, a solo show by Polish artist Natalie Kleszczewská, who is based in Kraków. Her paintings navigate the realms of horror, science fiction, romanticism, and visions of futures that never came to pass.

Natalie Kleszczewska’s paintings raise an issue articulated by theorist Mark Fisher: contemporary culture constantly returns to the aesthetics of futures that never came to pass, recycling visions of tomorrow inherited from previous decades instead of creating truly new visions. Kleszczewska’s works do not merely illustrate this idea; they operate directly within it.

Figures combining human, animal, alien, and posthuman traits repeatedly appear in the paintings without definitively aligning with any single category. They are not bound by a fixed narrative. Instead, the same forms and gestures recur in different paintings, each time undergoing slight transformations. They function more as variations on a shared set of characters than as individual episodes of a single story.

Kleszczewska describes her approach as artificial romanticism. She draws on forms we already know and transforms them just enough to make them seem unfamiliar. A horse, a face, or a landscape changes just enough to lose its familiarity, yet remains recognizable. Allure and unease are equally important here. Horror, however, functions not merely as a reference to a specific genre, but rather as a way to depict something that defies existing categories. The spaces in her paintings are often empty and motionless, functioning more as psychological spaces than as mere backdrops.

The exhibition’s title refers to a state of utter enchantment, as if one were under a spell. The paintings do not represent a specific prediction of the future. They work with existing cultural material, myths, forgotten aesthetics, and half-remembered images of tomorrow, which they reassemble into new configurations.