Under His Wings I Will Find Refuge, 2025

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

This painting is a hymn to inner safety and embodied sovereignty. It speaks about a moment of arrival — not in a place, but in a state of being, where the need for external validation dissolves and is replaced by a quiet, unwavering sense of protection that comes from within. The figures do not seek to escape the world, but to be fully present in it — grounded, visible, and at peace.

The wings in this work symbolize more than divine presence; they represent the internalized guardianship we begin to feel when we allow our own strength and softness to coexist. There is no split between the sacred and the earthly here — the wildness of the instinctual self is not exiled, but integrated. The tiger-like companions reflect this primal force, tamed not by control, but by deep recognition.

This piece explores the idea that refuge isn't absence of fear, but the presence of something greater: self-trust, spiritual intimacy, and the embodied knowledge that even in exposure, one can be held. It's about reclaiming the right to rest, to feel watched over not from above, but from within.

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.