Waiting Room 2006

Małgorzata Serwatka made this 60 x 80 cm piece, called Waiting Room, and you can see how she’s really unafraid of throwing all sorts of marks and images in together, like she’s not precious about it. This is a mixed media piece, so there’s paint, collage, printmaking. It feels like a really open process, and that sense of play with the medium really comes across. There’s a tension between flatness and depth here, with the collage and the painting fighting for space. I keep coming back to the cows at the bottom. They seem grounded, solid, but also totally surreal, covered in flowers or stripes. This piece reminds me a bit of Kurt Schwitters, someone else who was really pushing the boundaries of what collage could do, what art could be. And like Schwitters, Serwatka invites us to embrace ambiguity, to see the beauty in the unresolved.