Exhibition
Size Matters / Agata Gertchen
The exhibition “SIZE MATTERS” presents two cycles of linocuts created alongside the experience of early motherhood, where artistic practice intertwines with the rhythm of everyday responsibilities, limited time, and the ongoing effort to reclaim space for personal creative work.
The scale of the works is not merely a formal decision, but a record of the artist’s real working conditions, a measure of available time, energy, and emotional intensity.
The cycle of miniature works “CRUMBS” emerges in brief, stolen moments between daily tasks. The small format reflects the fragmentation of the day and gestures that remain almost invisible. The titular crumbs, scattered by children during meals, become a metaphor for repetitive and often unnoticed care work. Each print records a fleeting moment of concentration, an attempt to find order and attentiveness within domestic chaos. Here, the miniature functions as a strategy of creative survival, adapted to time that is never entirely one’s own.
In contrast, the large-format linocuts from the “A MESS” series allow for intense physical and emotional expression. The monumental scale becomes a space of stepping beyond the rhythm of everyday duties, a site for the accumulation of tensions and emotions that build up within the private sphere of the home. Where “CRUMBS” remains quiet and intimate, “A MESS” reveals a gesture that is forceful, expansive, and releasing.
The exhibition explores the relationship between scale and experience – both in the creative process and in the reception of the printed image. The size of each work becomes a language through which questions of visibility and invisibility, self-negotiated time, and the tension between control and chaos are articulated.
Agata Gertchen
Agata Gertchen (b. 1985, Rawicz, Poland) is a visual artist whose practice includes printmaking and drawing. She graduated with an MA in Graphic Arts and Graphic Design from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, where she later received her PhD (2016). She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Studio of Intaglio Printing at the same institution. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions in Poland and internationally, and she has held twenty-four solo exhibitions.
Her artistic practice grows out of everyday life and the objects that shape it. Through printmaking and drawing, she explores overlooked fragments of daily experience, traces of routine, and the quiet tensions embedded in domestic reality. By focusing on what is often unnoticed or ephemeral, her work reflects on the visibility of everyday actions and the fragile balance between order and chaos within ordinary life.
