Keeper of the Inner Garden, 2023

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

"Keeper of the Inner Garden" is a contemplative piece that serves as a gateway to the soul's serene sanctuary. This painting, a part of the 'Inner Garden' series, portrays a majestic deer standing poised on a checkered ground, symbolizing the balance between the wildness of nature and the structured beauty of personal growth. The deer's alert gaze and vibrant red hue speak of a creature that is both of the earth and beyond it, a protector of the internal landscapes we cultivate within ourselves. The background, a lush tapestry of blues and greens, evokes the richness of the inner life, inviting the viewer to reflect on the depth and beauty of their own personal growth and the sacred spaces they hold dear. The bold, confident brushstrokes and the dreamlike quality of the scene invite introspection and a recognition of the guardianship we must all undertake over our own internal realms.

Inner Garden Series. Daria explores the possibility of self-identification of a person from fragments of cultures and concepts, her works actualize the thirst for the integrity of the individual in the ever-changing cycle of ideas and meanings. The artist asks the question about the possibility of being an integral person in the metamodern era, characterized by oscillation between polar concepts and rethinking of fundamental ideas of the past. Her work is an internal response to the question of what integrity is and whether there is a need to strive for certain ideals.

Her work is also an external response to the totalitarian concepts that still exist in society. Concepts that are imposed from above require a false integrity, namely a certain ideology, and persecute everything that goes beyond these concepts. Born at the crossroads of Ukrainian and Russian cultures during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Daria manifests the norm of fragmentation as the norm, replacing the demands of integrity with the ideas of accepting otherness as unconditional beauty. Her characters build their own world in which culture has not become a dictatorship - a world that Daria considers her home.

Here is what Daria herself says about her works

I draw hybrid creatures and symbols of a mixanthropic world because I myself feel like a hybrid of cultures and identities. I desire wholeness, I love to see it in others, but I feel fragmented in myself. My paintings are my way of coming to terms with my own fragmented identity, and my way of showing that the beautiful does not always have to fit into an already existing framework.