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New
Moon
18 Jan 2026
Hannah
Linden
Office
After Office
by Paweł Kuczyński
Again, a woman creeps towards
a man with his pants around his ankles
and even then he wants to be magnified
to a hundred times his own size. Not
all men, of course. It’s always worth
remembering that our beloved sons are
possible futures. A man sits in the office
of himself and feels the failure of it, the
caught off-guard. The wrong picture
will always be the wrong colour paint
applied with the wrong brush. It could
be funny if ludicrous wasn’t the only
model that men have of how to live.
And yes, I’m angry, like all women
are angry, that I can have compassion
at the same time as feeling the constant
itch of scars that will never truly heal.
Behind the poem...
Kuczyński’s paintings often use humour and the surreal to convey uncomfortable or disquieting political messages. Imagining myself as the woman in his Office, I thought about a book I came across years ago – Reflecting Men: At Twice Their Natural Size. I wanted to tease out some of the messages I read into the painting: both the work itself, and its title. I thought about all the relationships between men and women – at work, in the home, personal and family ties; about how these relationships are structured, collide and impact on one another. The contextual damage, too, represented for me by the fire of the painting’s background colour.