POETICS OF ATTACHMENT
MARIA KATYANOVA
What does it mean to be attached to an image, a story, a feeling, a screen?
In an era where intimacy is increasingly mediated by interfaces, attachment no longer forms slowly through touch or time alone. It flickers, accumulates and loops. It is felt as longing, through a fascination of nostalgia. 'Poetics of Attachment' unfolds within this emotional terrain, tracing how contemporary subjectivity is shaped by inherited myths, digital aesthetics, and the persistent desire to feel something real.
For Maria Katyanova, attachment is not merely emotional but visual and material. Images cling to us long after we stop looking at them; symbols repeat until they feel personal; archetypes slip from collective memory into private fantasy. Her work inhabits this space between inner life and cultural residue, where mass-produced imagery becomes the raw material of selfhood.
Emotion touchpoint system from the series Datastream of myth, 2025, Oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm
€ 3700
Working between painting and sculptural intervention, Katyanova constructs worlds that feel intimate and estranged. Faces emerge through layers of painterly softness, only to be interrupted by metallic elements; tears, flowers, icons. These elements introduce weight, sharpness, and permanence which remind us that attachment, here, is something that presses down, leaves a trace, and alters our perception.
At the core of the exhibition is Digital Dreams (2025), a series of portraits depicting contemporary “princesses”, figures suspended between romantic longing and digital enclosure. Styled to resemble photographs taken with early 2000s consumer cameras, the images shimmer with flash glare, grain, and gentle glitches. These visual imperfections evoke a moment before global aesthetic standardization, before feeds and filters smoothed experience into sameness.
Daydreaming, 2025, Oil, Metal on canvas, 29 x 39 cm
€ 1600
Yet this nostalgia is not innocent. The heroines of Digital Dreams embody what Katyanova describes as digital melancholy; emotions experienced through screens, processed through symbols, and stored in archives rather than bodies. Metallic tears slide down porcelain cheeks. Surrounding them are icons borrowed from both fairytale lore and early internet culture: unicorns, roses, moons, bows. These symbols form an imagined utopia of softness and reverie set against the fragmentation of contemporary reality.
Beauty III, 2024, Oil, Metal on canvas, 26.5 x 35 cm
€ 1600
This dialogue between archetype and individual experience deepens in the ongoing series Sleeping Beauty (2024–). Drawing on myths and fairy tales that have shaped cultural understandings of femininity, Katyanova revisits the figure of the sleeping, suffering heroine. From Persephone to Psyche to Disney princesses, these narratives repeat a familiar structure: passivity, endurance, reward deferred to an external savior. Sleep becomes a metaphor for suspended agency, for a life lived in anticipation rather than action.
Beauty II, 2024, Oil, Metal on canvas, 26.5 x 35 cm
€ 1600
In Katyanova’s cinematic portraits, these princesses inhabit pale pink landscapes reminiscent of early 2010s internet aesthetics; tumblr-era softness, curated sadness, aestheticized vulnerability. The works however do not critique these images but linger within them, asking why they remain so seductive. What does it offer to aestheticize grief, longing, and melancholy? How do these symbols; beauty entwined with suffering shape contemporary consciousness in a world governed by new, algorithmic gods?
Beauty I, 2024, Oil, Metal on hardboard,19 x 26 cm
€ 1200
Rather than offering resolution, 'Poetics of Attachment' holds space for ambivalence, showcasing that sentimentality and irony can coexist: a metallic rose can feel both sincere and artificial. The exhibition proposes attachment as a creative force as much as a constraint, a way of binding meaning, memory, and desire into something that persists.They reflect not only the artist’s inner landscapes but the shared visual subconscious of a generation shaped by mass culture, digital intimacy, and recycled myths.
Key, 2024, Oil, Metal on canvas, 49 x 80 cm
€ 2500
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