Hortensia Mi Kafchin: Years of Bad Hair
At Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s first solo show with PPOW, her avatars are set in paintings of collage-like worlds that meld together Surrealism, technology, and fantasy in a contemporary mindset. Mi Kafchin is a Romanian artist who grew up in a post-Communist and post-Chernobyl Romania. At the time in Romania, there was an influx of Western culture that was set alongside the traditional Eastern Orthodoxy. Mi Kafchin was inspired by this melding of cultures, and her paintings can be read as a journal chronicling a story or dream. In the painting, Years of Bad Hair (2022-23) we are met with the backside of a character, perhaps a self-portrait of the artist, who has technicolor angel wings. She is surrounded by a plethora of hair and beauty products: from a box of tissues to nail polish, a hair dryer and scissors, boxes of pills, presumably hair growth ones, and shampoo, the main character clearly struggles to find a cure to her scraggly hair that cascades down her back. With her brownish-yellow hand, she holds a hairbrush and turns to it, almost as if it were a mirror or looking glass.
P.P.O.W. Gallery, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor, April 28 - June 3, 2023