"I paint what it feels like to grow up as a girl in a world that desires, consumes, and disciplines female bodies. My work moves beyond autobiography into a shared space of vulnerability, resilience, and contradiction. Through oil painting, I stage girlhood not as nostalgia, but as a site of tension and awareness. The figures in my paintings are young women rendered in saturated pinks and reds. Their bodies are often disproportionate, with enlarged hands, contorted limbs, and glassy, watery eyes. These exaggerations visualize the experience of inhabiting a female body as exposed, hyper-visible, and constantly negotiated. They exist in a suspended emotional state between vulnerability and self-protection. Drawing on surreal realism and theatrical composition, my work balances sweetness with menace.

Motifs such as rabbits recur as silent witnesses rather than decorative elements. Knives, tears, and tender gestures coexist, producing an emotional contrast between innocence and awareness. Rather than explaining pain, I insist on its visibility. My work performs it, confronts it, and mythologizes girlhood into something both grotesque and sacred." Dominika Kováčiková (b. 1996)