Jung's ideas on the significance of myths and dreams in the human unconscious underlie many of Ablewska-Lech's pictures. Dreams are a constant source of reference for her paintings and drawings. Blessed with the gift of waking with an image and composition fully formed, she is freed to concentrate on questions of technique to represent its significance.
On encountering the pictures of Marzena Ablewska, we seem to be viewing a realm that lies beneath the world we take for granted. We catch its echoes through the artist's vivid images, rendered with meticulous skill.
Alongside her vivid dreams myth is another important source. Female figures such as Hecate, Danaë, Medea and Persephone, are not so much subjects of a familiar narrative as symbols of the female in often disturbing relation to her environment. This may be represented by scenes of nature teeming with real or imagined creatures and/or by distortions of human form that accentuate the female plight. Symbols may not have unique values, however; the snake, for example, is regarded as evil in some cultures but as sacred in others. Such ambivalence is exploited in much of the artist's work.
Ablewska recalls a game she used to play in the Kozienice Wilderness of her childhood called 'Secrets'. It involved finding and carefully arranging objects, - 'treasures' - inside a box, then burying it out of the sight of others. When we look at her pictures it is tempting to think that what we are witnessing is their unearthing.