Andrej Getman

A Cage Called Family

It is a raw and unflinching look at what it is like to grow up queer in a home that doesn’t always accept you. These paintings confront the tension between blood ties and the need to be yourself, revealing how love can feel conditional, how the very place meant to protect can instead become a prison, and how home, a space that should nurture, can sometimes feel like a cage. It is a home that demands you hide who you are in order to belong, a quiet, constant pressure that shapes every corner of your life. These works are portraits of that quiet oppression: the rooms that seemed to shrink with every secret kept, the years spent carefully measuring words and gestures, the small silences that were louder than any outburst.

Each painting tells a story of long-term confinement, a kind of struggle that stretches from childhood into adulthood, leaving scars that linger even when we leave the physical space behind. They speak to the hidden wounds that never fully heal, the quiet acts of courage that often go unnoticed, and the stubborn, unyielding beauty of staying true to yourself despite the bars on the cage that confine you.

This exhibition is both witness and protest, an acknowledgement of pain. It invites to confront the cost of hiding: the emotional labour of suppressing parts of your identity, the self-surveillance required to fit into spaces that were never fully safe, and the exhausting vigilance demanded just to be tolerated. Through every brushstroke, every line, every shadow, each artwork asks to feel the weight of what it means to be silenced.

And yet, at the same time, to recognise the power in survival, resistance, and the continual process of becoming yourself, to claim your visibility, and to live openly, authentically, without apology. It is a testament to the ways in which art can bear witness to oppression, demand recognition for hidden suffering, and honour the strength required to live and love without compromise.

This exhibition does not offer comfort in the easy sense; it does not shy away from discomfort. Instead, it stands as a bold, honest reflection of the realities faced by many queer individuals growing up in homes that are anything but safe. It challenges us to see what has been hidden, to acknowledge the pain that often goes unseen, and to bear witness to the courage, defiance, and unshakable beauty of surviving and thriving, despite it all.