AGNES GUMMERE - Art & Process

Agnes Gummere is an artist and interior designer whose work ranges from oil paintings to residential interior design projects. Throughout her lifelong passion for art and design, she has drawn on influences from art history, centuries-old oil painting techniques, and contemporary digital mediums. Growing up surrounded by art in Philadelphia, and earning her Bachelor of Science in Interior Design from Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, she has always been inspired by the city’s rich history of art, design, and architecture, as well as its museums and galleries.

Agnes’s creative practice stems from her genuine passion for painting, as her process develops through observation and unfolds in layers of oil, pastel, and graphite. Her body of work, figures, objects, and architectural forms, becomes a way to explore character, atmosphere, and memory. Each painting is built with ambient layers, textures, drips, and markings that reveal both process and time. What begins as realism often drifts toward abstraction, as light dissolves into gesture, creating works that balance precision with impermanence. At its core, her practice is about painting representationally, while embracing the process of creating textures, marks, and shapes, which emerge along the way.

Her work invites viewers into spaces where reality and imagination overlap. A portrait may reveal more than a likeness; a still life may suggest movement, time, memory, or mood. Often, Agnes paints from objects in her own home, such as a vintage heirloom teapot, a favorite book placed in her studio window. In still lifes she frames the everyday as something worthy of pause and attention, while similarly, figures are painted in moments of movement, reframing a glimpse of motion within the stillness of the canvas. In this way, her practice not only captures presence but also reflects a way of living with objects of meaning, tying into her work as an interior designer, and the intention behind each selection. By balancing figures, still lifes, and interiors, her paintings create a world that feels both intimate and expansive, one where history, memory, and imagination coexist.