BIG HEADS, 2008-2020

Big Heads investigates embodiment, vulnerability, and psychological presence through exaggerated, archetypal forms. The series draws on the tension between monumentality and fragility, using scale to amplify emotional states rather than represent individual identity.
Realized as sculptural works and installation configurations, Big Heads occupies space through direct physical presence. The works confront the viewer at eye level or above, creating an encounter that is at once intimate and destabilizing.
The series represents a shift toward sculptural language as a primary vehicle for psychological exploration, reinforcing di Masternak’s interest in the body as a site of memory, projection, and collective recognition.

"The Heads series of paintings consist of a group of large scale paintings by Agata di Masternak. Distinctive and visceral, this evocative series of works communicates from the depth of the artist's own suffering and dislocation. Each work explores a different perspective on the theme - that of the artist examining the impact of her own mortal demise on both herself and others around her.

The knowledge that these paintings were immediately preceded by Agata spending the night biting on haemostatic dressings after a massive haemorrhage in her mouth, having been told by a doctor that surgery would only proceed if she survived the night, strongly impacts the way the works are experienced.

What is accessed through these works is beyond the experience of most and it is this rare, privileged viewpoint that we are invited to share. Within that sense of loss are sometimes featured columns and rows of friends, family, acquaintances - some completely obscured, others still visible in different stages of visibility or dissolving back into the ether or in various states of obstruction. These works are juxtaposed with other works that focus exclusively on the artists own terrified and distorted physiognomy.

These paintings were Agatha's testament to life shining brightly inside her - a concentration of her complete life-force; an expression of her dismay, her terror and her determination to draw something from the meaningless of her own cessation. It is a chance for us to consider our own relationship to life itself and to contemplate what occurs beyond when all seems to be lost.

The works are a protest against just letting go without a fight, of hope over despair and the power of art to say something of the ineffable, of that which can last well beyond our own mortality, they capture something of the artist's extreme dimension of reality that in this case can contribute to what gives our own lives meaning".

Alexander de Cadenet