Immaculate conception#2, 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,

"Immaculate Conception #2" from the "Perichoresis" series continues the reflection on holiness as an inner experience where the physical and the spiritual are not separated. This work focuses on the moment of silent consent—not as submission, but as a mature and conscious choice to engage in dialogue with the divine.

At the heart of this image lies the idea of silence as a form of strength. It is not passive waiting for a miracle, but a deep, deliberate stillness before the beginning. The female figure is not portrayed as a vessel into which something is placed from the outside, but as a source—capable of conceiving meaning, life, and transformation from within.

The painting raises the question: is the immaculate possible as purity of intention, as contact with the inner light, without severing the connection to the body, to the human? Holiness here is not the denial of flesh, but its sanctification. It is a recognition of the profound value of female choice, gaze, presence, and the readiness to be not the object of a miracle, but its bearer.

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.