CV
Ukrainian figurative artist Daria Pogodina, born in 1992 in Lugansk, Ukraine, completed her education at the College of Design in 2012. Since 2016, she has been actively engaged in painting while simultaneously practicing as a garden designer, artist, and researcher of art history. Daria has extensive experience in landscape design and painting, actively pursues her artistic practice, and sells her paintings worldwide.
EDUCATION
2019-2021 Kyiv Art School Evening Course of Painting, Ukraine
2017-2018 Design School of Marina Kriachko, Kharkov, Ukraine
2018 Design Urban School Kharkov, Ukraine
2008-2012 High Building Collage Landscape Designer and Arhitecture, Luhansk, Ukraine
RESIDENCIES
2022 Kunst Residenz in Thun Stärke und Verletzlichkeit
PRESS
Exhibitions
2022 Solo Exhibition Stärke und Verletzlichkeit / Escape Vide - Thun, Switzerland
2022 Group exhibitions In Ukraine / ZRC - Ljubljana, Slovenia
2018 Group exhibitions Room of my Minds, Ukraine
2017 Group exhibitions Garden as an Art, Kyev, Ukraine
2014 Group exhibitions Gift of Volhvs Severodonetsk, Ukraine
2013 Group exhibitions Fragment of Life, Luhansk, Ukraine
2012 Collaborate Project Light of Hearts, Luhansk Ukraine
Paintings are in private collections in the USA, South Korea, Italy, Great Britain, Germany and Switzerland.
STATEMENT
New sexuality and personal integrity are the main directions of exploration in Dasha's artistic practice. She investigates ways of self-identification through fragments of ideas and concepts, actualizing the thirst for personal integrity in the whirlpool of meanings and theories.
Dasha questions whether it is possible to be a whole person in the era of metamodernism with its total moderation and oscillation between polar concepts.
As an artist, she focuses on the nature of the corporeal, perceiving the body as a membrane that reflects her into this world and communicates the world to her. The existing cultural narrative has initiated the perception of the female body with pornographic tension, and from here stems her interest - where is the boundary between pornography and the nature of the body? What would the world of sexual relations look like if it were completely safe and devoid of aggression?
Dasha appeals to her own experience of living life in a female body. She explores how the attitude towards the body changes with the shift in worldview paradigms, how the narrative of shame and provocations would sound in a world of tolerance and trust.
She questions whether the female body can be integrated into the context of visual art as a neutral object of aesthetics, without the tension of pornography and the necessity to be a sexualized icon.
All these questions are her ways of searching for personal integrity through the body, will, and worldview.
In search of answers, Dasha engages in dialogue with the sensual lexicon of Kiki Smith, the philosophical works of Simone de Beauvoir, and also finds support in the sublime corporeality of early 13th-century Gothic art by Giotto, where images are not burdened with the tension of formal anatomy.
Her works are filled with color, decor, and at the same time, are illustrative. Dasha transforms her works into visually light at first glance stories, which, nevertheless, do not call the viewer to cold episodic contemplation, but on the contrary, open the possibility to safely return to one's secret "self".
She creates a space of naive archetypal images of fairy tales and myths, creating a refuge from aggressive modernity, with the opportunity to delve into the psychological depths of one's own worldview.
Dasha incorporates into her paintings the mechanics of oscillation between naivety and mockery, trust and cynicism, chastity and debauchery, strength and vulnerability, as a manifesto of the right not to choose between different sides of oneself and to be whole with all its contradictions.
She creates images of people and beings in which the line between desires of different ages is blurred, naivety and sexuality are free from the hypertrophied narratives of our time, dictating the boundaries of ethics and aesthetics.
The heroes of her paintings build their own world, in which culture has not turned into a dictatorship, a world that artist considers her home.