P·P·O·W is pleased to present Years of Bad Hair, Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Imbuing a highly classical painting style with her own mythologies, fairytales, and belief systems, Kafchin’s avatars traverse time, space, and reality to reach states of self-transformation and liberation. Hybridity, a central tenet of Kafchin’s practice, is innately tied not only to her transition from male to female, but also to her upbringing in a post-Communist and post-Chernobyl Romania in which an influx of Western culture intertwined with deeply rooted Eastern Orthodoxy and Medieval traditions. Akin to alchemical experiments, Kafchin’s canvases combine the male and female, the East and West, the traditional and contemporary, and the scientific and spiritual, to create dialectic formulas which together reveal the power of the imagination as a divine and uniting force.

For Kafchin, technological advancement is the spiritual destiny of the human evolution, to transform our vessels, overcome the human condition, and create new realities. In monumental paintings such as Mother of Singularity, 2022-2023, Kafchin reveals her vision of a utopian techno-future born out of humanity’s current struggles and suffering. An alien civilization of our own making, the technological sublimity depicted in this composition is matriarchal, non-violent, dualistic, harmonious, and based in Taoist philosophy. In a contemporary landscape, where a given reality can be hard to comprehend, such works invite viewers to embark on a futuristic odyssey in which the regenerative fuel of the human imagination becomes our salvation. To quote David Wojnarowicz, “Hell is a place on earth, Heaven is a place in our head.”