Kateryna Lysovenko graduated in painting from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and currently lives in Austria. Her painting is rooted in the Ukrainian naive art tradition, but she consciously uses the form of expression of socialist realism, her compositions feature both mythological figures and symbols of Christian iconography. In the changing political and social climate of the 2010s, her pictorial language was shaped by a break from Soviet legacy and ideological influence, and by cultural, social and artistic independence. Since her flight from Ukraine, her paintings have been concerned with the reality of war, interpreting it from a personal and broader historical perspective. The most common themes in her paintings are violence against women and children, the suffering of the innocent, alienation and the consequences of generational trauma. The subjects of her paintings are hybrid beings, half-human, half-animal figures, wounded in their humanity, degraded into animals by the physical and psychological trauma of war violence. In solidarity with the victims, suffering alongside the mourners and speaking out against the brutal manifestations of war, her works are both activist statements and philosophical commentaries, which she uses to speak about the human condition, sharing them on social media. In her painting Kindergarten, the absurdity of the will to live of a generation now growing up is juxtaposed with the war conditions (dark skies, desolate, devastated landscape) that make it impossible. The trauma of staying, fleeing, dying and being condemned to life is a heavy burden on all generations of the Ukrainian people.
Viktória Popovics