Summer/25, 2025

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

This painting will come to you stretched on a wooden stretcher and completely ready to be placed in the interior.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

“Summer/25" from the series is a fixation of summer as a state of mind — an inner choice to preserve warmth despite the instability of the outside world. This work is built on the principle of quiet resistance through the everyday: familiar objects, brought together, become not just a still life, but a personal time capsule.

The book, the cup, the coffee, the fruits, and the flowers — they are not merely elements of domestic life, but symbolic anchors tied to feelings of peace, ritual, and safety. This is a private geography of summer, recurring every year, but in 2025 it carries a special meaning: as if holding on to this scene is the very way to survive, to stay connected with oneself, not to let the inner landscape collapse.

The sun in the sunflowers, the warm yellow fruit, the bitterness of coffee — all of these come together as sensory markers of time, capable of bringing a person back into their body, back into feeling. This is not art that escapes reality, but art that chooses to face it quietly, in dialogue, preserving the familiar, the earthly, the living.

(Madeleine Series)

The “Flower Madeleine" series is a meditative reflection on memory, time, and life that continues despite everything. It is not just a visual archive but an emotionally charged exploration of how we remember, what we choose to preserve, and which images become inner anchors.

Inspired by the Proustian effect—where the taste of a madeleine cookie unlocks forgotten memories—each work in this series becomes a gateway into the “invisible rooms of the past." Yet the artist does not strive for precise reconstruction: the memories in these paintings merge with fiction, evoking a sense of déjà vu or dreamlike states. This is an autobiographical diary, where objects from everyday life and the garden attain an almost sacred status.

A central role in the series belongs to seasonal flowers and fruits. They function as markers of time, as a way to capture the present without turning to overt political symbolism. Amid war, anxiety, and destruction, the artist makes a deliberate choice to look toward life, documenting her inner landscape through earthly, living forms.

The flowers are hyperbolized—larger, more vivid, more saturated than in reality. They become canonical images, nearly icons of resilience. Fruits—symbols of ripeness, abundance, and fragility—also speak to the inevitable cycles and enduring vitality of life.

Thus, the “Flower Madeleine" series becomes a unique dialogue between past and present, between reality and memory, between personal vulnerability and the steady choice to stay alive. It is art as resistance against oblivion, an attempt to preserve the self and one's world—not through fear, but through beauty.