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 contemporary 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.
