Skip to main content
Ewa Doroszenko The Girl and the Machine painting 01

The girl and the machine

A series of oil-acrylic paintings on canvas

The painting series consists of dozens of oil-acrylic paintings of different dimensions. On the surface of the canvases, I combine fragments of an expanding machine with images of women. The characters in the paintings, naked and vulnerable women, dream of the power that the machines juxtaposed against them have. Using the traditional and centuries-old medium of painting, I depict a contemporary world in which the line between the virtual and the real is blurring. I am interested in the phenomenon of today’s advanced technologies, which increasingly affect our lives. Donna Haraway, the forerunner of cyberfeminism, stated in her 1985 essay 'The Cyborg Manifesto’ that we can neither escape from technology nor fall into uncritical euphoria, rather we should look Medusa in the face with optimism, joy and creativity and invent some entirely new ways of coexisting with the monstrosity we have become. Using painting techniques, I work through the unmetabolized fears associated with the evolution of man-made entities. Overcoming concerns about the coming future, I create configurations of corporeality and current technologies.

To illustrate the complex and multifaceted way state-of-the-art technologies operate, I go beyond the framework of traditionally understood images and compose multi-elemental systems made of them. The individual paintings cease to function as objects in their own right; instead, the relationships between them and their relation to the exhibition space become important.

I intend to „draw” the viewer into the game of following the successive fragments of the growing structure, created by connecting, disconnecting, and finding new possibilities of connection. Some elements lead nowhere, and others become looped, which may directly suggest the principles of the Internet – one of the most important technologies of our times. Moving away from the illusory way of representing specific devices towards depicting the complex processes taking place in a complicated mechanical system, I paint geometrized forms. The paintings become an expression of an attempt to capture or register specific general formal and functional characteristics of a mechanism. The synthetic technical structures exist only on the planes of the canvases, they are a subjective vision that tries to 'get out of the frame’.

The painting series consists mostly of premiere paintings not presented in an exhibition. Some of the canvases from the series have been presented in group exhibitions and art magazines.

Selected interviews and articles:

Ewa Doroszenko malarstwo obraz 01

Ewa Doroszenko

– intermedia artist, PhD in fine arts, graduate of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. She was a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland in 2019, a winner of many international competitions, including Preview – Fait Gallery Brno 2016, Debuts 2018 – doc! photo magazine, Debut 2018 – Lithuanian Photographers Association, and a finalist in Noorderlicht International Photo Festival 2021, Kranj Foto Fest 2021, International Festival of Photography FIF BH – Brazil 2020, Athens Digital Arts Festival 2020, GENERATE! Festival for Electronic Arts 2019, Der Greif and the World Photography Organization open call 2018, FILE Electronic Language International Festival Sao Paulo 2015.

Participant of many Artist-in-Residence programs, including Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz in Austria, The Island – Resignified Lefkada in Greece, Re_Act contemporary art laboratory Terceira Island in Portugal, Petrohradska Kolektiv Prague in Czech Republic, Kunstnarhuset Messen Ålvik in Norway, Del Bianco Fondazione in Italy, Klaipeda Culture Communication Center in Lithuania, AAVC Hangar Barcelona in Spain. She has presented her works in many exhibitions, including Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Kasia Michalski Gallery in Warsaw, Center for Contemporary Art in Torun, Vilnius Photography Gallery, MAH – Museum of Angra do Heroismo, Fait Gallery in Brno, Propaganda Gallery in Warsaw, Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin, Polish Institute in Düsseldorf, Witold Lutosławski National Forum of Music in Wroclaw.

Complete biography:
https://ewa-doroszenko.com/bio