THE THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN | ANTROPOCENTRICA

Birth, 2024, oil on canvas, 140x180cm

The Feminine Thread and the Warp of Mother Nature

Artist – this is one of the personalities Daria Pietryka has chosen to realise her plans and challenges. She is also an architect, interior designer and set designer, but always and above all she remains a Woman. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why she analyses both imposed and imagined images of women through her work.

The author links femininity with the cyclical nature and rebirth. Balancing between tenderness and brutality, she allows us to see the woman as both: the nurturer of the domestic hearth and as a being caught up in social expectations. Daria Pietryka’s work is distinguished not only by its subject matter, but also by her approach to artistic form. Alongside the painter’s traditional working tools, one of the important elements of her work is embroidery, which is inextricably associated with women’s handicrafts. The artist transforms thread into a medium for contemporary art, freeing it from stereotypes or, on the other hand, attributing to it the role of a tool for freedom of expression, or even a thread presenting the evolution of the role of women in culture, and the evolution of women’s thoughts about themselves.

The author weaves the history of the Earth into the story of her art, starting with the birth of unicellular and multicellular organisms, up to homo sapiens, which appears aproximately 200,000 years ago. This point in our planet’s lifeline can be marked simultaneously as the beginning of the end of the Earth. This seemingly distant theme in Daria Pietryka’s work relates directly to the exhibition presented at the Wozownia Art Gallery. It is an expression of concern for Mother Nature and a tribute to her children. Here, love thus becomes resistance to the thoughtlessness with which we treat the planet that feeds us and to which we are mere guests. The theme of transience, death or longing is not avoided here. Through her work, the artist touches on both global and personal themes. She shows that the individual human being and the environment are linked by the same story – the circle of life. Our planet, therefore, is in the midst of a slow and painful death, of which we are the cause. Pietryka raises the ecological theme here. He notes first and foremost the fact of the extinction of animals, the destruction of their natural environment. Another important aspect is that human has contributed to such a serious destruction of life that, at the moment, the number of mammals bred for meat many times exceeds the number of those living in the wild. Despite such a violent theme, the artist’s exhibition speaks of love. Perhaps it is the only weapon with which we can overcome our own destructive urges. The bestowal of tenderness and comprehension can contribute to the understanding of the others. Who are the others? They are our brothers and sisters – the animals, they are the plants, and they are the other human beings.

Pietryka’s exhibition, like all of her work, is a dualistic picture of human and the world. Here, love is placed next to destructive force, life dances with death, and it all intertwines beautifully like a weft and warp that form an inseparable whole.

Jacek Świderski – curator of the exhibition

Sleeping With a Harpy, 2024, oil on canvas, 170x120cm

Everything Under Control, 2024, oil on canvas, 140x200cm

Exhibition The Things That Have Been Wozownia Art Gallery in Toruń, 28.02 -30.03.2025r.

author’s comment

The exhibition The Things That Have Been tells the story of two dimensions of dying, explored from two different perspectives. In the first dimension, I explore death as a personal loss that is associated with the loss of loved ones. In the second, the leitmotif is the global extinction of species, about which scientists have been sounding the alarm for years, but which seems imperceptible to the average urban or rural dweller. It is even abstract.

These two different perspectives, named here for the sake of order Anthropocentrica and Biobotanica, are presented through two different forms of presentation and techniques used. The first, more anthropocentric perspective, is mainly expressed through figurative painting on canvas, depicting the human experience and emotions of loss on a micro-scale. On the other hand, the global dimension of the disappearance or extinction of species (Biobotanica) is represented through more abstract forms, mainly embroidery on canvas and spatial installation, which convey the elusiveness and, of particular interest to me, the imperceptibility of the phenomenon of extinction. It is an observation made in the mindset of the distanced observer – where our remains become an exhibit among thousands of other remains of equally important, nameless beings.

Daria Pietryka