Every Temple Has a Snack Machine - Daniela Ponomarevová - Artist in Focus

Daniela Ponomarevová

Based in: Czech Republic

Medium: Installation, Drawing, Objects

Recent Exhibitions: Temple of Health, Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové, 2025–2026

Instagram: @strumka_540

Curator: Anna Horák Zemanová

Image Courtesy: Courtesy the Artist

Photography: © Markéta Hašková

Daniela Ponomarevová - Czech Republic, installation and drawing

The objects Daniela Ponomarevová builds are large, brightly coloured, and generous in a way that demands something back. She constructs spatial installations from recycled cardboard and covers them in dense graphic illustration, bold outlines, saturated colour, the visual language of fairground signage pushed somewhere between cartoon allegory and pop devotional.

The technique is hand stippling. Up close, you see the mark. From a distance, it reads like print.

Her sustained project, what she calls "post-fairground attractions", takes the visual logic of amusement parks and travelling fairs and reads it against contemporary wellness culture: the graphic intensity, the advertising language, the way spectacle shapes conviction before thought arrives. She is interested in how effects work. How ornament makes a claim. How a slogan turns a gym into a temple, or a temple into a gym.

The temple and the snack machine turn out to share the same logic. Ponomarevová doesn't resolve the collision, she makes it as vivid as possible.

The solo exhibition Temple of Health (Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové, November 2025-January 2026) is built around objects with specific, committed iconographies. The title work, a house-scale structure assembled from a television box, its exterior painted in cartoon brick, covered in motifs, standing on a stepped plinth, appears in two versions across two gallery rooms.

The first is domestic, house-shaped. The second is Egyptian: Tutankhamun in bright yellow, Anubis, a pyramid, and at the base of the plinth two milk cartons labeled "natural milk" and "lactose free." The temple comes in multiple cosmologies. Both are selling something.

Daniela Ponomarevová , Temple of Health (sign) , 2025–2026, painted cardboard. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová , Temple of Health , 2025–2026, cardboard installation, Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová , Temple of Health (detail), 2025–2026, cardboard, hand-stippled illustration. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová , Baguette Box , 2025–2026, cardboard, hand-stippled illustration. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová , EGG , 2025–2026, cardboard installation with painted anatomical heart. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.

On the wall nearby, the Ghost Automat , a vending machine in the form of Winnie the Pooh, fitted with shelves stocked with mouldy potatoes and cereal bars full of sugar, delivers exactly what the label doesn't promise. On the floor, a cardboard box marked "EGG" opens to reveal a painted anatomical heart. Three stippled baguettes sit in a baguette box. A painted crust hangs on the wall. Every object is meticulously made. None of them is what it appears to be at first glance.

The exhibition's logic is not satire, or not only satire. The artist says it directly: "Irony? Maybe. Celebration? Definitely." The works are too beautifully realised, too fully committed to the aesthetic they inhabit, for pure critique. A conceptual sketchbook, developed alongside the works, traced the symbolic architecture of each object, the hidden references, the layered iconographies. The thinking precedes the making, and the making is accountable to it.

When health becomes a brand and the fairground becomes a wellness centre, the question is not whether the temple is sincere. It is whether the distinction still holds.

Instagram Daniela Ponomarevová

Notable Works and Exhibition Views

Temple of Health , 2025–2026, cardboard installation with hand-stippled illustration, Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková

Daniela Ponomarevová, Temple of Health (detail) , 2025–2026, cardboard installation with symbolic and Egyptian-inspired imagery. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.

Daniela Ponomarevová, Temple of Health , 2025–2026, cardboard installation with hand-stippled illustration, Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová, Ghost Automat , 2025–2026, cardboard vending machine sculpture. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.Daniela Ponomarevová , Temple of Health (detail), 2025–2026, cardboard, hand-stippled illustration. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Markéta Hašková.

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This is an artist interview published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond. catapult.art

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