Term: February – May
Daniela Ponomarevová (*1998, Moravská Třebová) is a visual artist and drawer whose work combines drawing, painting, objects,
installation, and text. She employs original, post-conceptual approaches, including analyses and assembly instructions for individual
works. Since 2024, she has been a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts BUT in Brno. In 2025, she became a finalist for the
Critics’ Award for Young Painting.
Daniela explores the imagery of fairground attractions, “advertising smog,” and digital “attention grabbers” that encompass a
wide spectrum of visual representations: from TikTok videos, reality shows, and food porn to B-movie horror comedies, Hollywood
films, and IKEA paintings. She understands all these images as “symptoms” of a contemporary culture obsessed with attention.
She conceives the funfair as an existential metaphor for today’s world: an environment of permanent saturation, visual competition,
and inequality.
Based on this research, she develops her concept of the Post-Fairground Attraction. These are hybrid works; drawings and
objects that reflect how fairground aesthetic and performative principles spill over into contemporary media and public space in the
form of residual signs. Within a gallery setting, these works function as ambivalent objects representing three levels of meaning:
a contemporary critical work, an empty backdrop, and a pleasing attraction that is simultaneously comical and unsettling. Rather
than mimicking reality, Daniela revives it in a new “version on steroids”: distorted and bloated to such an extent that it can no longer
be watched.
Medium:
In her artistic practice, she primarily utilizes drawing and found cardboard, which serves as both a drawing carrier and a structural
element for creating her “post-fairground” objects. Here, cardboard acquires conceptual significance; it is a symbol preserving traces
of consumption, circulation, and logistics. As a democratic material, it allows her to explore the paradox between its cheapness and
trashy nature, its original function as packaging, and its transformation into an autonomous artwork exhibited in a gallery.
The leitmotif of this process is the covering of cardboard surfaces with detailed acrylic drawings created using a stippling technique.
The artist playfully refers to this method as “DIY airbrush”. The drawings often resemble digital prints, frequently leaving the viewer
unaware of the manual labor involved. This creates a visual illusion that pits handmade creation against the mass-disseminated
digital image.
Research Context:
Through her artistic practice, Daniela examines the nature of entertainment, boredom, and spectacle within the context of contem-
porary art. Her handmade works challenge the aesthetic preferences and cultural hierarchies rooted in everyday life, while creating
a space to rethink the significance of visual culture and the role of attention in the modern world.
