15 July 2025

The confessional art of Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts on display at Megalo

| By Sasha Grishin
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Slightly abstracted pink head drawing

Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts’ Attempts at processing a life(s), 4, 2024, ink and pastel on paper, 76 x 56 cm. Photos: Megalo.

Some artists use their art to illustrate what they see and observe, others communicate whole philosophies of being, while Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts employs her art as a confessional and cathartic medium.

Godoroja-Prieckaerts received her training in printmaking and drawing at the art school in Canberra and now lives in Melbourne. In 2023, she undertook the Telmo Estampa residency in Málaga, Spain. Her exhibition at the Megalo Gallery is in response to the different events that she has experienced over the past three years while living in Spain and Australia.

According to the artist, the somewhat awkward bilingual title was selected because she felt that Spanish conveyed better the idea of multiplicity of lives.

“I prefer the Spanish version of this title which translates to ‘attempts at processing a life’ or ‘some lives’ (unas vidas),” she said.

“We may mark these by place (‘my life in Spain’), or people (‘my life with Jamie’), or mental states (‘those years with major depression’), perhaps a combination, or something else entirely.

“But ultimately, the constant flux of life means we are always shifting, always learning, always unlearning and experiencing something new and different.”

Pink drawing of a figure seated in a room

Attempts at processing a life(s), 1, 2024, ink and pastel on paper, 76 x 56 cm.

The graphic arts, especially printmaking, have long seduced artists through their intimacy and diaristic nature.

In this exhibition, Godoroja-Prieckaerts selects the art forms most open to the immediacy of mark making. These include ink and pastel drawings, carborundum collagraphs, lithographs and monoprints, where chance and accident are given sway. There is a great immediacy in her work leaving little room for revisions or elaborations.

The large drawings, including Attempts at processing a life(s), 1, 2024, provide the viewer with a series of visual clues – an isolated female figure cut off at the waist and squeezed onto the page with the block of solid colour behind her.

The monochrome use of pink ink, sometimes supplemented with pastel, apart from the feminist associations creates a heightened emotional response where you confront and visually dissect this vulnerable figure.

Polychrome landscape-like scene

The healthy one, 1, 2025, monoprint on paper, 39 x 27 cm.

The monoprints including, The healthy one, 1, 2025, are technically more ambitious, polychrome and appear like discarded pages from a visual diary.

The artist in her lyrical catalogue notes observes: “The healthy one where they communicate well, share the load, embrace each [other’s] eccentricities and laugh lots”. It is possibly the most light-hearted piece in the exhibition.

black and white abstracted design

When we both hurt, 2023, lithograph on paper, 39 x 38.5 cm.

The prevailing mood of the show is more in keeping with the gorgeous black and white lithograph, When we both hurt, 2023.

The compositional masses are abstracted and there is a wonderful sense of floating ease as the air seems to circulate within and around the space occupied by the forms.

She writes of it: “A deep sadness. A rupturing. A deep loneliness despite you being there … A ghostly halo, perhaps the death of something. Certainly. And yet, there is still beauty – warm and gentle – despite the pain and hardship.”

It is like a solemn declaration that reminds me of the moment when Dostoevsky’s prince Myshkin declares that “beauty will save the world” and in the eyes of humankind he is deemed to be mad.

Interior room scene with figure seated on a bed

Pink Moon sinking, 2025, monoprint on paper, 39.5 x 27 cm.

Another memorable work, the monoprint Pink Moon sinking, 2025, plays with the idea of isolation in company and the menace of loneliness.

They are strongly lyrical drawings and prints that capture a whole catalogue of emotions, moods and situations.

If they are to be described as troubling, diaristic and accompanied with a suppressed scream of despair, it is because the artist aspires to higher beauty and reality and sometimes the banality of matter leads to disappointment.

Hence the cathartic emotional explosions throughout the exhibition. Perhaps this artist also believes in a beauty that will save the world.

Zoya Godoroja-Prieckaerts’ exhibition Intentos de procesar una(s) vida(s) – Attempts at processing a life(s), is at Megalo Print Studio & Gallery, 21 Wentworth Avenue, Kingston, until 16 August. The Gallery is open from 9:30 am to 5 pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

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