The exhibition presents selected prints by Krystyna Wróblewska from the Ossolineum collection and paintings, sculptures, installations and objects by a contemporary artist Justyna Adamczyk. Through their works, both artists explore themes of suffering, loss and mourning, processing autobiographical themes in an unobvious way. 

Krystyna Wróblewska (1904–1994) experienced the trauma of the Second World War. In 1941 in Vilnius, during a search of her flat by the Gestapo, her husband died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her with two teenage sons. The younger of the two, Andrzej, one of the greatest Polish painters of the 20th century, died in 1957 in an accident in the Tatra Mountains; he was twenty-nine years old. The motif of motherhood and loss was a recurring theme in her work. The exhibition features several self-portraits by Wróblewska from different periods of her life, as well as a poignant print, 'Mother', depicting a grieving woman holding an infant.

In many of her self-comments, Justyna Adamczyk (1981) admits that she is interested in the ambivalence associated with memory. Since 2007, she has been creating drawing notebooks in which she commemorates victims of violence. The exhibition includes the paintings 'Backwards', 'Rotten', 'Bold' and 'Washy', which express suffering, difficult to narrate and somehow abstracted from a single biography, and are thus essential and universal.

Both artists draw on themes associated with myths, hence the title of the exhibition – Hekate, one of the Greek goddesses of the underworld, helping the dying and those experiencing loss, also patronising childbirth and, more broadly, travel and change. The interest in rituals, rites of passage and anthropological symbolism is present in the works of Justyna Adamczyk (in series such as 'Votive offerings', or the objects 'Corals', 'Beads' and the installation 'Talisman'). Krystyna Wróblewska also draws on fairy-tale and mythological motifs ('The Afternoon of the Faun', 'Sabbath', 'Cinderella', Furies, 'Idyll', 'Diana') as well as religious and metaphysical ones. The exhibition includes the graphic work 'Stabat mater', combining her characteristic themes of motherhood and suffering.

The diversity of techniques and approaches of the two artists highlights a complex picture of the contemporary experience of suffering, combining biological, cultural and spiritual elements. Adamczyk and Wróblewska translate personal traumas into the language of art in different ways.  Although their paths diverge at certain points, they both portray the most important aspects of existence in an interesting way.