Helena Kotnik doesn’t just paint—she dissects, reframes, and rebuilds. With a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Barcelona University and the Akademie der bildende Künste in Vienna, along with a Master’s degree that sharpened her conceptual vision, Kotnik works at the crossroads of emotion, analysis, and visual clarity. Her paintings speak not only of technique but of psychological tension, cultural references, and an urgent curiosity about the world we live in. She uses color like a scalpel, not to embellish but to expose. Her work often draws from familiar imagery—historical paintings, societal norms, personal memories—but never settles into nostalgia. Instead, it pushes forward, challenging the viewer to keep up with the questions being asked.
In her 2025 piece titled Friends, Kotnik references Grant Wood’s American Gothic, though not as parody or homage. Instead, she treats the original painting like an architectural foundation—solid, symmetrical, and loaded with meaning—only to strip it of its original context and rebuild it with a modern sense of friction. Where American Gothic gave us a stiff, ambiguous couple rooted in early 20th-century stoicism, Friends reimagines that formal pairing through the lens of contemporary relationships and evolving roles of women.
The piece is rendered in gouache and pencil colors, 70 by 50 centimeters, and framed in a way that feels fresh, without being flashy. The women in the painting carry quiet intensity; there’s no overt display of emotion, but you can feel the pulse beneath the surface. What makes the painting work is Kotnik’s understanding of stillness—not as stagnation, but as pressure. You can feel history brushing up against the present, asking: What has changed? What hasn’t?
Freedom, also from 2025, brings a different rhythm. Made with pencil colors and soft pastel, the 65 x 50 cm work is airy, almost glowing. It’s not abstract, but it leans toward the poetic. Here, Kotnik explores the internal sense of alignment—what it feels like when things click, when time and movement seem to conspire in your favor. She doesn’t spell it out; there’s no clear narrative. But the feeling is there, in the composition’s flow, in the way the elements seem to move through space without resistance.
This painting also speaks of history—not just personal history, but collective movement. Kotnik touches on the way events link together, how one moment builds on another. There’s something musical about it. You get the sense that she sees time as layered, not linear. And in that layering, she finds space for both individual clarity and larger historical awareness.
Then there’s Porsche (2024), a sharper, more ironic piece. Using gouache, ink, pencil colors, soft pastel, and watercolor, Kotnik brings together an array of textures and tools to examine how modern ideals are packaged and sold. Porsche isn’t just about the car. It’s about everything the car represents—status, desire, speed, control. But instead of glorifying those ideas, Kotnik freezes them in place. The work acts almost like a mirror held up to societal clichés: Here is what we chase, what we replicate, what we convince ourselves is real.
And yet, she doesn’t mock it. There’s no cynicism in the piece. Instead, there’s a sort of reluctant tenderness—a recognition that these symbols, however flawed, are part of how we make sense of possibility. It’s a painting about myth-making and the strange logic of dreams turned into products.
Taken together, Kotnik’s recent works form a loose trilogy: Friends tackles the weight of gender and tradition; Freedom floats in the realm of personal alignment and collective change; Porsche drills into the spectacle of desire and constructed realities. What connects them isn’t subject matter, but method. Kotnik asks questions in layers. She sketches ideas, overlays meaning, and uses color as both shield and scalpel.
Her work doesn’t shout, but it doesn’t whisper either. It speaks in a voice that’s steady, curious, and unafraid to sit with contradiction. In a time when much of art chases novelty or spectacle, Helena Kotnik gives us something else entirely: the chance to pause, to feel, and to look again.
