My haven my refuge my heart, 2025

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

"My haven my refuge my heart" from the series

This work speaks to the healing power of physical closeness — to an embrace that ceases to be just an action and becomes a space. A space where one can hide from anxiety, be washed with trust, dissolve into safety. This is not just contact — it is a shelter, a homeland, a center of gravity and a place of grounding.

The figure of the woman, surrounded by the bodies and necks of horses, intertwines with them in a single circle — almost womb-like, almost ritualistic. What unfolds is not mere merging, but a synchronized movement: care, acceptance, mutuality. The warmth of these bodies speaks of a bond that does not require words, but arises from the synchronicity of movement, breath, and touch.

The painting explores the idea of unconditional acceptance. It is a place where you do not have to be “convenient" or “understood." Here, you are loved simply because you exist. And in this affirmation — of loving oneself through the other — lies the heart of its meaning.

PERICHORESIS SERIES 

“Perichoresis" (ancient Greek περιχώρησις - “interpenetration"), a theological term meaning the mutual penetration of divine parts into each other, to describe a unique union that does not imply mixing or merging, but emphasizes an indivisible unity.

Daria explores the theme of new sexuality, deliberately choosing a term from theological treatises for her series of works.

With this gesture, she protests against the dictates of religion, the church's manipulation and pessimization of human sexual manifestations and physicality, the false meanings and concepts with which religions have burdened, and instead of building true connections and bridges for man and God, they build walls.

“Perichoresis" for her is a beautiful and complex term that describes the fusion of the divine and the material. Having grown up in the Protestant tradition within an Orthodox society, Daria notes the common separation of sexuality from divinity in all these religions, while she sees sexuality as the clearest manifestation of divinity, beauty, and sublimity.

The artist notes that Christian culture has invested the image of the female body with a narrative of pornographic tension, while at the same time presenting paradise before the Fall as a sexual paradise, the Garden of earthly pleasures. For the artist, sexual paradise is a safe environment, complete trust, acceptance, the opportunity to open up and discover the Other, the opportunity to learn to be loved and to love.

Love is an environment where merging does not dissolve in another person, but on the contrary, strengthens the individuality of each and enriches each other.

Thus, the artist reminds that the division into the sublime and the low in love is artificial, and overcoming this division can make life more beautiful. The heroes of her paintings are immersed in the enigmatic space of love, and sometimes there are ironic scenes that balance the degree of sublimity.