art historian, curator, cultural worker based in Vienna

Bittersweet presents works by five artists who examine motherhood and parenthood through five distinct media: embroidery, encaustic painting, comics, digital drawing, and printed textile. The title reflects the coexistence of conflicting emotions in early parenthood—joy and fatigue, attachment and ambivalence, intimacy and isolation—that run through each work in the exhibition. The exhibition addresses the underrepresentation of unsentimental and critical perspectives on early parenthood in contemporary visual culture. Each artist develops a personal visual vocabulary to depict the experience of caring for a child, foregrounding processes of adjustment, redefined identity, and the negotiation of social expectations. Alongside maternal narratives, the exhibition includes a father’s perspective that challenges patriarchal constructions of fatherhood by entering the sphere of ‘mothering’—the intimate, embodied, and repetitive labor of daily care traditionally assigned to mothers.

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Parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is often framed in public discourse as an idealized and emotionally unambiguous experience. The expectation of immediate affection and fulfillment after birth leaves little space for accounts of ambivalence, delay in emotional bonding, or the psychological impact of altered roles. By bringing these aspects into focus, the works in the exhibition make visible a set of experiences that remain marginal in both artistic and social representation.

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The project situates parenthood within a wider socio-political context, approaching it as a form of reproductive labor with specific emotional, temporal, and physical demands. This framing connects the private sphere of caregiving to structural issues such as gendered division of labor, the invisibility of domestic work, and the pressures of maintaining professional identities alongside parental responsibilities. In this way, Bittersweet offers a framework for understanding parenthood as a site where personal experience intersects with broader political and cultural structures.

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The works span a range of media and approaches: Vuk Palibrk’s black-and-white comics bring a dose of dry humor to the strains of early fatherhood, revealing its parallels with maternal experience; Marija Todorović’s encaustic paintings, developed as part of psychotherapeutic and occupational therapy work during a period of severe postpartum depression, layer wax and pigment into abstract records of psychological states; Milena Gajić’s digital drawings interrogate the tension between motherhood, artistic identity, and the invisibility of domestic labor; Saša Bezjak’s embroidery on everyday textiles maps familial relationships and microstructures of care from a feminist perspective; and Mia Arsenijević’s printed and hand-embroidered friezes weave together memories of childhood with present-day experiences of motherhood, using embroidery as both a symbol of women’s work and a tool for personal narrative.

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Photos by Željka Aleksić