Chaos is understood today in rather negative terms. It is associated with anxiety, mess, dirt, war. To me, it has little to do with the image of woman. The way I see it, women have been bringing order to chaos, especially to the chaos of everyday life, for centuries. They take care of the fundamental things. However, it is not for me to judge, as I too am chaos. I therefore prefer the interpretation in which I am the cosmos. I give shape to matter yet undefined, I traverse the world in my “formlessness,” I become harder day by day, life comes out of me.
Daria Pietryka
In her exhibition entitled Chaos Is My Name, Daria Pietryka invites us to embark on a shared journey, which, while raising important subjects, is somehow underlined with darkness and uncertainty. Through her art, she introduces us to the realities of the contemporary world, highlighting step by step the problems plaguing it. Alternatively, it may be perceived as more of a reflection, sifted through her own experiences and gradually revealed to us in a very bittersweet way.
In almost every work Pietryka smuggles a bit of her own private world. It is not a vivisection, of course, but a deep and filtered thought on subjects that she finds important and that in principle concern each of us. In the case of the featured works, virtually each of them contains a reference to the artist's private life – a book she has just read, the music she is listening to or a story she has heard. But also – and this is important – to the political, social, ideological and economic situation. Reality is mixed here with fiction, fairy tale with nightmare, happiness with uncertainty. And in any case, it is done in a visually striking way. Based on her own visual language, the artist tells us about universal truths that have recently made themselves painfully clear to us – the climate crisis, global armed conflicts, violations of women's rights or migration and the social perception of the Other. It is therefore an elaborate story about humans and humanity, individuals and community, solitude and sacrifice, but also – crucially, perhaps – about a world made up of opposing driving forces, those of creation and destruction, which maintain the balance of our fragile universe.
The exhibition has been divided into several parts, each reflecting a particular stage of the Wrocławian artist's work or her fascination with a particular theme. It thus consists of several painting series created over the last five years, which have been presented together in one place for the first time. Three fundamentally distinctive motifs can be singled out here – woman and motherhood, nature and cyclicality, and fears and anxieties, arranged by the artist in such a way as to converge at various, sometimes unapparent points. Of course, one could write extensively about both the exhibition and the painter's work. However, it is also worth trying to decode the hidden meanings in the works on one's own. For the truths they contain are extremely universal and all of them touch each of us on a daily basis, which is why we can find a piece of ourselves in each of the paintings.