COLLAGE — Agata Stepien

Contact
tel. +48 578 906 129

Twins sisters

A tumor with teeth

He was dying, but longed only to
comb his fingers through her hair

A snake in front of the Nazi’s house is dancing the lambada

Still Life with Stars and tumor/He bowed his head like a foal
into my cleavage, as if to drink from a hidden spring and
regain vitality. Collage portraits

Diptych in the kitchen

The bride, and she collapsed

passions of Mortal Kombat: Cobra bites the python, python strangles Cobra, python dies from venom, Cobra from asphyxiation

not a jerk but a jerky, not a snob but more of a snobby-wob

I’m having lunch with my mom and watching another mom across the room feed her mentally disabled child the same delicious tiramisu we’re eating

Google says that you should tell a joke to a person with cancer, or do the laundry/ My boyfriend loved me so much that he cut me into little heart-shaped pieces by the river.

homeless woman with painted lips shocks a passerby

A mother gives birth in prison under the watch of a female guard/Secret breast tunnels

Houses live in the trees/Family and the arriving butterfly

Old unemployed men like newborn kittens/
A homeless woman with painted lips shocks a passerby

Collage

The artist’s collage works possess a distinctly poetic character – they emerge from rapid, intuitive gestures and are composed of found footage materials sourced from the visual overflow of daily life: the internet, pop culture, advertising, film, and social media. These compositions attempt to reconstruct alternative narratives of contemporary cities – their iconographies, rhythms, and micro-events – while also capturing fleeting fragments of digital culture. Meme aesthetics, YouTube, and Instagram become living archives of emotion and fragmented perception.

These collages function as visual notations – personal, emotional reactions to overstimulated environments. They serve as a form of resistance to the chaos and visual noise of contemporary life and as a way of taming that noise through the processes of deconstruction and recomposition. Tearing, cutting, shifting, and reassembling become therapeutic gestures – means of reclaiming agency in a scattered and tension-filled world.

At the heart of this practice lies the poetics of collage, already legible in the works’ titles – often long, surreal, brutally tender, oscillating between grotesque, lyricism, and absurdity. These titles do more than suggest a narrative; they are artistic texts in their own right, on equal footing with the visual layer.

Sample titles of the works (in original Polish and English translation):
– „zapłodnieniadowidzenia”
fertilisationgoodbye / impregno-see-you

– „heroinistka podlewa róże zmarłej matce”
heroin addict waters roses for her dead mother

– „bezdomna z pomalowanymi ustami szokuje przechodnia”
homeless woman with painted lips shocks a passerby

– „wąż przed domem nazisty tańczy lambadę”
a snake dances the lambada in front of a Nazi’s house

– „schylił głowę jak źrebię wprost do mojego dekoltu jakby chciał napić się ze źródła ukrytego i odzyskać witalność”
he bowed his head like a foal into my cleavage, as if to drink from a hidden spring and regain vitality
– „nie dupek lecz dupeczek, nie buc lecz bardziej bucyk”
not a jerk but a jerky, not a snob but more of a snobby-wob

– „namiętności Mortal Kombat: Kobra gryzie pytona, pyton dusi Kobrę, pyton zdycha z powodu jadu, Kobra z powodu duszenia"passions of Mortal Kombat: Cobra bites the python, python strangles Cobra, python dies from venom, Cobra from asphyxiation

– „runęła z balkonem podlewając petunie”
she collapsed with the balcony while watering petunias

– „jem obiad w restauracji z mamą i obserwuję mamę z naprzeciwka która karmi swoje dziecko z porażeniem umysłowym tym samym pysznym tiramisu co my jemy”

I’m having lunch with my mom and watching another mom across the room feed her mentally disabled child the same delicious tiramisu we’re eating

– „smród z rzeźni idący przez cmentarz żydowski do mojego okna”
stench from the slaughterhouse drifting through the Jewish cemetery to my window

– „staruszkowie bezbronni jak nowonarodzone kocięta”
elderly people as defenseless as newborn kittens

– „moja matka klęczy w sklepie Żabka z Romką, która jej spontanicznie wróży i modlą się razem do Maryi, kasjerka woła ochronę”
my mother kneels in a Żabka store with a Roma woman who spontaneously reads her fortune, and together they pray to Mary, while the cashier calls security

These works function as psychic snapshots – glimpses of an internal monologue rendered visual, becoming jagged, painful, and strangely beautiful reflections of our time.