ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dasha Novak was born in the Czech Republic and is based between the sensory thresholds. She holds a Master's degree in Media Arts from Emily Carr, University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. Experiencing the world through multiple forms of synesthesia, her practice emerges from the collapse of boundaries between sight, touch, sound, taste, memory, and emotion.

Dasha's impasto oil portraits operate as sites of quiet disturbance - images hover between recognition and estrangement. Drawn to the human face as a carrier of hidden narratives, she searches for what is momentary yet irreducible: a tension in the mouth, a truth lodged beneath expression. These fragments of presence are not documented, but translated through dense, expressive layers of paint; Dasha arrests the fleeting and renders it physical. The surface becomes a record of touch, sensation, and time, where faces are not merrily seen, but felt.

These portraits do not aim to represent likeness; instead, they preserve an encounter - intimate, unstable, and deeply human.