Who’s Afraid of the Dark

SECCI Gallery, located in Milan in Via Olmetto 1, is pleased to announce the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of the Dark“, a new solo show by DARIA DMYTRENKO, reaffirming the gallery’s long-standing collaboration with the artist. Curated by Chiara Guidi, the exhibition will open on Thursday, September 19 at 6:00 PM.

In this new project, the Ukrainian artist, now residing in Venice, creates a large-scale site-specific pictorial intervention, unfolding as an uninterrupted wall painting. Like the traces of our subconscious, it will cover every wall, creating a new landscape on which to install her thick, immersive paintings, all emphasizing a single theme: the looming sense of darkness, which for the artist, beyond a feeling of fear, becomes her main source of inspiration.

This is a literary and visual darkness, tied to nocturnes, to dormant consciousnesses that are simultaneously provoked to dream. A magnetic, dreamlike veil that scratches at reason, giving way to primal emotions, like the lurking threat to consciousness that generates fears of fantastic and unsettling animals: presences that flash unexpectedly in her paintings.

A hundred years after the first Surrealist Manifesto, Daria Dmytrenko not only keeps this continuity alive through major female figures (Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington), who were pioneers of feminism, but also demonstrates the inexhaustible validity of this avant-garde movement.

In her painting, especially in its dark side, the artist maintains a flow of contemporary surrealism free of any form of academia or imitation. Instead, it is a deeply considered and well-honed formation that aligns with her aesthetic and intellectual choices.