Dominika Kováčiková Paints Girlhood with a Knife!
Step inside the candy-colored, emotionally charged world of Slovak painter Dominika Kováčiková, where girlhood is both battleground and mythology. Her surreal, hyper-feminine works tackle trauma, vulnerability, and the dark joy of rebellion.
Too Cute to Cope: Femininity as Fight in Dominika Kováčiková’s Art
There’s a girl in a cake holding a knife. Her skin is the color of cherry bubblegum, her stare heavy-lidded and unflinching.
Dominika doesn’t just depict girlhood — she dissects it with sugar-coated scalpels.
She’s not there to serve dessert — she is the dessert, and also the threat. Dominika Kováčiková’s work doesn’t knock on the door of girlhood trauma. It kicks it open with a pink-iced combat boot.
Kováčiková paints what it feels like to grow up as a girl in a world that devours girls — but also expects them to smile sweetly while being eaten. Her figures are hyper-pink, hyper-vulnerable, hyper-aware.
Dominika Kováčiková - Artsy
They cry, they pose, they threaten, they play. They’re porcelain and punk. They’re not metaphors — they’re real.
Dominika Kováčiková: Two intimate close-ups that crawl under the skin — on the left, ants invade a blushing fold of flesh; on the right, a mysterious orifice is veiled in a delicate net of red bows and white threads. A study in discomfort, beauty, and bodily surrealism. Oil on canvas, 2024. Permission and courtesy of the artist.
Trained in Banská Bystrica and now making noise across Europe, Dominika paints like someone trying to make sense of a lifetime of mixed signals.
Her girls want love but expect betrayal. They long for softness but wield knives. There’s a deep internal dissonance in each canvas — emotional chiaroscuro between innocence and awareness.
Take the painting of the girl in the red gingham shorts, crouched in whipped cream, holding a kitchen knife like a truth she’s about to tell.
The bunnies aren’t cute — they’re complicit
This isn’t a parody of pin-up — it’s a resurrection of pain and femininity, layered in saccharine tones. She’s not your birthday surprise — she’s the final reckoning.
Dominika Kováčiková: Two close-ups drenched in desire and discomfort — a glistening pickle penetrates parted lips on a heart-shaped canvas, while an apple strains against a mouth, tear-streaked and raw. Kováčiková plays with taste, tension, and temptation in these unapologetically visceral works. Oil on canvas, 2024. Permission and courtesy of the artist.
Her protagonists often appear disproportionate — hands oversized, limbs contorted, heads too large — exaggerating how the female body feels rather than how it looks.
The eyes are glassy and watery, as if they’ve just stopped crying or haven’t started yet. And then there are the rabbits: fragile, tender, ever-watching. They’re not sidekicks. They’re witnesses.
This theatrical, surreal realism dances dangerously close to kitsch, but then pulls back just in time, weaponizing cuteness into something biting.
Her palette is pop-culture pinks and reds, but what she paints are emotional labyrinths. The girls here are not objects; they are battlegrounds.
Dominika is not merely documenting girlhood — she’s staging it, stylizing it, and mythologizing it into something simultaneously grotesque and holy.
Past Exhibition at La Causa Galeria Madrid
It’s no surprise her exhibitions — from La Causa in Madrid to NBB Gallery Berlin — sell out and start conversations. Her heroines aren’t looking for a savior. They are becoming one.
In a saturated art world that still sidelines emotionality as something “feminine” or frivolous, Kováčiková doubles down.
Her work refuses to intellectualize pain — instead, it performs it, traps it in oil, and dares you to look away.
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