Portfolio [PDF]

Odonchimeg Davaadorj left Mongolia at the age of 17 to embark on a journey to France and, passing through the Czech Republic, she arrived in Paris in 2007.
This identity journey allows her to express her personal perception of the world through different artistic techniques and to confront herself with Western culture. By drawing, painting and sculpture but also by video, performance, dance and poetry, the artist says: «At some point I feel the need to create an artwork. If it is a poem, I have to write it, if I cannot write, I have to move, dance or draw». Even before the beginning of her journey to Europe, Davaadorj had empathized with the nature of her land, through a simple and self-sufficient lifestyle in her home village isolated in the steppe.
The works of art she created in that period are inevitably expressions of this closeness to the animal and plant world. After her arrival in Europe, her works are pervaded by the nostalgia of Mongolia of which she describes small intimate worlds made with all kinds of technical support and with great emotions. All the elements (men, women, animals, houses, landscapes) belong to the melancholic memories of childhood and they are often suspended in a natural metaphysical context that reinforces the dreamlike aspect of his work. The most used color is red, synonymous with vitality, which is sometimes joined by the presence of a red sewing thread, which refers to the circulatory system of blood in the human body. We should mention the works of art of Louise Bourgeois (feminine and carnal), Indian miniatures and classical Persian (descriptive and meticulous in the stories of everyday life) and Imran Qureshi (violent and precious) to find an aesthetic root in her works and in her love for fabric, sculpture and details. 
Odonchimeg Davaadorj has followed the pictorial figuration since the beginning of her career, exploring the complexity of the human soul both in small-format drawings and in large canvases where often there is only a large monochrome human face. The range of colors of the artist is on purpose restricted (red, blue, black, yellow) because she said she wanted to focus mainly on the line and the essentiality of the composition. The very nudity of the painted bodies underlines this choice by directing the gaze towards the themes treated and not towards anatomy. 
Nothing is hidden from the living being, starting with sexuality that is free from shame or exhibitionism. Davaadorj develops a poetic idea of “inner landscape”, of spiritual intimacy and deep nature that exists in every person by offering a representation that does not literally describe, but that communicates the plurality of emotions of a human being. These representations evoke the alchemy and energies that circulate and transform our bodies. Through an approach that blends with nature, the artist describes the inner journeys of souls and the very essence of existence.
The works on paper present portraits and places where they reveal emotional landscapes where little details show something more of each person, like concentrated extracts of life.
Davaadorj explains: «What interests me most at this moment is to represent anonymous faces, to try to make them inhabited, to give them a soul, to tell a story through their characteristics making them bringer of emotions».
The artist remains linked to the representation of the real world, while bringing a certain form of hybridization inspired by his Mongolian roots: polymorphic creatures appear before our eyes, populate a world of bright colors borrowed from nature, from the mythology and oral traditions of the East. Davaadorj’s works open up to a subjective and personal reading of the image beyond the limits of verbal communication; the painted portraits play with a conscious use of textures and motifs, often ambiguous and intense; the contrasts of colors and shapes create a subtle emotional tension that connects to contemporary issues such as feminism and environmental protection.