Lucia Dovičáková - So what will I cook tomorrow?

Lucia Dovičáková - So what will I cook tomorrow?

Opening: 28 October 2025, 18.00
Curator.
Duration of the exhibition: 29 October 2025 - 22 February 2026
Alžbetina 22, Košice

Lucia Dovičáková paints life. Her themes naturally evolve in time according to what is happening inside her, her family and society. Although she has a reputation as the enfant terrible of the Slovak art scene, she herself has no desire to shock or rebel. She only authentically reflects what is important to her at the moment. Her new work mixes autobiographical motifs with social themes, dealing with loneliness, male-female, family relationships or the phenomenon of OnlyFans. Through a grotesque form, she manages to balance between the macabre and the ridiculous, while at the same time encompassing the depth and complexity of the issue. Doviculous is a moralist: it only shows what we usually overlook.

From the beginning of her career as a painter, we can see in her a particular preoccupation with women, with their survival in contrast to the social demands that are placed on them. Related to this are the figures of men who play the role of secondary characters in Dovičák's paintings - they are defined by the relationships women have to them.While the women often have self-portrait features, the men mostly remain anonymous, their specific identity irrelevant. In this way Dovičáková (perhaps unintentionally) overturns the centuries-old power order manifested through the genre of the female nude. The female body most often appears in art history in the form of the nude model, who is the passive (both sexual and artistic) object of the male painter. Even in the cases that Dovičáková paints naked women, they are full-fledged beings with their own feelings, desires, and initiative; or they are parodies of patriarchal eroticism.

The current exhibition features several paintings inspired by the phenomenon of OnlyFans - a platform where people offer erotic content of various kinds for money. The most successful are young girls who look like teenagers and claim to be virgins (at least that's what Lucia Dovičáková observed). Their fans are mostly middle-aged married men. On the one hand, many people condemn OnlyFans for various reasons, but others appreciate the fact that the women here are in control of the situation and determine what they will show and for what reward. Dovičáková does not moralise with her paintings, but expresses her own complex emotions and doubts. The motif of the young eroticised girl is reminiscent of Dovičáková's early work - paintings from her diploma series, where she shifts models from erotic magazines into a grotesque form. One can see here the fascination with the phenomenon of the young female body becoming a product in the erotic business, and especially the artist's attempt to subvert, to make impossible, the usual dynamics in a subversive way. In the actual paintings, the explicitly sexual positions of the women are complemented by the figures of the elusive (present and absent at the same time) man, who is depicted as an empty suit. His collar simultaneously forms a halo over the women's heads, in a way 'sanctifying' their actions.

The second part of the work consists of intimate, autobiographical accounts. Some concern home and the closest relationships. A child for whose sake even divorced parents can overcome their hurts and work together; whose very existence is a reason for the mother to find the strength to carry on, even in her worst moments. Or on a lighter note - an adorable parrot-destroyer who brings a humorous element to the exhibition.

Although inspired by her own experience, Dovičáková captures the feelings of many women. Despite the awareness of feminism, the world still pushes us into roles in which we are comfortable and expects so much of us that the inevitable result is an almost constant sense of our own failure. The painter depicts the various tensions usually through metaphor, sometimes with elements of violence, which need not only be physical and often comes from within us, directed against ourselves.

In addition to anxiety or sadness, the painter also works with the theme of (unfulfilled) desire. Surely the erotic scenes where a man grows close to a woman, grass grows out of his skin and his penis is a massive tree, express these very feelings. The man here (unlike in the OnlyFans motifs) is not a predator, but instead offers a support and pleasure to rest against, to root oneself into.

In the exhibition we will see both oil paintings and watercolours. The latter allow Dovičáková a lightness and airiness in her brushwork that contrasts with the layered, 'dirty' paintings, though they are thematically unified. They reveal to us another twist and turn in Dovičák's artistic journey, which is as unpredictable as life itself. So what will he cook up tomorrow?

The creation of the works was supported by a grant from the Fund for the Support of Art.