GRAPHIC ARTWORKS — Agata Stepien

Graphic artworks

In the artist’s drawing practice, the dominant format is radically small – sometimes no more than 1 × 1.5 cm. These miniature works function as intimate micro-narratives, exploring themes of corporeality, female sexuality, and the unfiltered absurdities of daily life. They operate deliberately outside of grandiosity or pathos, favoring instead a language of distortion, playfulness, and quiet subversion. Figures twist, blur, transform; even the faintest mark – a fingerprint, a drop of ink – can trigger the emergence of a character, a story, a fleeting emotional truth.

At once visual and textual, the drawings often extend into printmaking – primarily etching and aquatint – yet always preserve the scale of what the artist calls “pocket drawings”: works meant to be carried close, like a secret, a diary, or a charm. These drawings act as private records of bodily and emotional states. One includes the line:
“Today I took three sleeping pills, half a bag of popcorn, and five caramels – then I cried and didn’t know why.”

In another, the memory of her mother’s heart attack is rendered with devastating clarity:
“It was a very beautiful day. Later, I found myself calculating how much it costs to transport a corpse from abroad.”

There is no embellishment here, no attempt at narrative closure – only a confrontation with reality in its rawest, most dissonant form. What these works reveal is a radical tenderness: a refusal to stylize suffering, but also a refusal to strip it of its beauty. Life appears as it is – beautiful and terrifying, light and unbearably heavy.

Through these fragmentary works, the artist offers a counterbalance to the monumentality of her large-scale paintings. Drawing becomes not just a formal exercise, but a space of resistance – a site for experimentation, confession, and emotional recalibration. These are visual capsules of vulnerability and defiance, intensely personal yet painfully universal.

Each image carries the tension of emotional compression. It is within these smallest of frames that the artist reclaims her agency, processes grief, catalogues absurdity, and confronts the brutality of being alive – with a sharp pencil and disarming intimacy.