About

In 2021, Daria transitioned from her career as a creative director in the advertising industry to fully dedicate herself to art. Since 2023, she has been studying painting at the contemporary art school Ar.Co in Lisbon.

Her first solo exhibition “Performance of the Perfectionist” took place in November 2023 at Garagem Lisboa, featuring installations and oil paintings. In July 2024, Daria participated in an art residency organized by Ar.Co and MUHNAC (the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon). The residency culminated in a group exhibition in September 2024 at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual, where she presented seven selected works.

In March 2025, she took part in the women’s group exhibition “Love. Life. Liberty.” at Art Gallery Nika in Málaga, Spain, and collaborated with Neptune Commune in Lisbon on “Sisterhood is Powerful”, a project supporting women.

Most recently, from September 13 to October 20, 2025, Daria presented the duo exhibition “Imagined Language” at Art Gallery Nika (Málaga), curated by Irina Machneva Mota. The project explored themes of memory, folklore, and identity through painting, textile, and embroidery.

Starting with familiar media — canvas, fabric, thread, oil — and then shifting their expected function, Daria Múhina allows them to move beyond their traditional roles. Each material is a voice, and they are encouraged to argue, echo, or fall silent in relation to one another. For Muhina, experimentation is a way to listen to the material rather than control it, and a key source of evolution. She references illustrations from Russian folktales and motifs of figurative painting, the use of ornament, rhythm, and line to open a doorway into mythological space. Blurring the boundary between the real and the fantastical, archaic symbolism can resonate as a unified visual language through Múhina’s works. The artist investigates the preservation of folklore and fairy tales in the context of an understanding of being Slavic in the contemporary moment. Rather than thinking in terms of nationality, the artist considers the principle of connection which resists logic and affirms childhood; the memory held in the body; the formative landscapes.

As opposed to nostalgia or reconstruction, Múhina attempts to hear something still alive within tradition and translate these phenomena through collage, painting, textile, and embroidery. Drawn to symbols that seem to travel — from tale to tale, from one culture to another, the artist deconstructs and reimagines them, allowing them to exist in new contexts, rather than replicating them. Identifying reoccurring archetypes (the mother and daughter, the forest as a threshold between worlds, transformation as a rite of passage), Múhina’s work expresses the importance of shared narratives, as they remind us that we’re not alone in our experience, and form the basis of human connection through universal experience.