I'm not afraid anymore, 2022

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

The painting titled "I'm Not Afraid Anymore" is a visceral representation of triumph over fear. It showcases a figure in a gentle embrace with a large, vibrant red creature, possibly a mythical embodiment of challenges or fears. The central figure's posture, clinging yet relaxed, speaks volumes of newfound courage and the cessation of fear.

Vivid colors dominate the canvas; the fiery reds and oranges of the creature contrast sharply with the calming turquoise background, evoking a sense of passion and peace coexisting. The characterful brushwork, with its thick, confident strokes, adds a dynamic texture to the piece, giving life and movement to the composition.

Script-like symbols scattered across the canvas may suggest a narrative or incantations of courage, while the large, watchful eye symbolizes awareness and protection. This painting is a bold statement on the power of embracing one's fears to find inner strength and serenity.

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 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 inner response to the question of what integrality 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 idea of accepting otherness as unconditional beauty. Her characters build their own world in which culture has not become a dictatorship - the world that Daria considers her home.

Here is what Daria herself says about her works

I draw hybrid creatures and symbols of an anthropomorphic world because I 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.