Too Hot to Handle

Klaudia Januško’s solo exhibition Too Hot to Handle juxtaposes the dominant patterns of female representation in contemporary video games and their possible cyberfeminist critiques with imagery from Romantic-era landscape painting. The thematic base of the large-scale oil on canvas paintings in the exhibition is formed by the artist’s landscape experiences and their documentation during her artist’s fellowship in Iceland last autumn, on the one hand, and the central thematic thread of her previous solo and group exhibitions, namely the video game protagonists (and their wider pop cultural equivalents: cyber-femme fatale, final girl, etc.) shaped for the masculine gaze, on the other. ) and the hypersexualised body politics surrounding them.