Artworks by Daria Zavadenko

I was born in Molodohvardeysk, in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, and I now paint in Kyiv. The landscapes of that place never left me. They are not simply views of nature, but fragments of a place that persists in memory, suspended between what remains and what can no longer be reached. I return to the same motifs again and again, searching for the moment when fields of colour and patches of light come together to form a landscape balanced on the threshold between abstraction and recognition.

I work in oil on board with broad brushes and generous amounts of paint, building thick, sculptural surfaces and reducing each scene to a few essential masses. I often work on textured, imperfect surfaces, allowing their irregularities to become part of the painting. These irregularities introduce a quiet tension between the physical surface and the remembered landscape it holds. I leave relief strokes visible where they contribute to the composition. Up close, you see the paint itself and the texture of the surface beneath it. From a distance, the painting opens into spaciousness and soft light. The intimate scale draws the viewer closer, capturing the quiet, fleeting atmosphere of a moment in nature.

My Atmospheric Studies series is built around a recurring compositional structure: a shifting sky above a still earth. The ground remains constant. The sky turns heavy, pale, or luminous, and the same view becomes a different memory. Sometimes the sky withdraws into a reflection on water or behind a canopy of trees, and the light settles on the ground instead. I want to strip a moment of natural beauty to its emotional core, not to reconstruct the landscape as it was, but to preserve the feeling of a world that can no longer be fully recovered and let the viewer encounter it in its rawest, most concentrated form.

My paintings are held in private collections across Europe, the United States, Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore.