Between Ground and Sky: Yuriy Bolsa's Solo Show at Liste Basel 2026

This week opened with a remarkable occasion for the international art world: Liste Art Fair Basel 2026, one of the most significant platforms for emerging galleries globally, welcomed 105 galleries from 36 countries. Among them, Ukrainian art holds a particularly meaningful presence. Visitors to the fair this year have the opportunity to see works by Yuriy Bolsa — one of the artists represented in the UFDA collection of digitized art.

A solo exhibition of Yuriy Bolsa’s works — I Tripped Over a Cloud While Looking at the Ground — is brought to Basel by Voloshyn Gallery.

The solo show takes its name from a deceptively simple consequence of urban life: the involuntary upward glance. At its core, the exhibition poses a question that is both intimate and political — is looking up at the sky an act of genuine wonder, or a deliberate evasion of surrounding tragedy?

Bolsa does not offer a resolution. Instead, he inhabits the tension between these two positions. In a time of war, the mere capacity to find beauty carries moral weight. Some look at the sky; others ascend to it, so that those below may live without fear. The works in this exhibition explore what exists at the threshold between those two gestures.

The paintings trace Bolsa's reflections on his relationship with space and environment, rendered through largely anthropomorphic silhouettes placed in varied compositional settings. As is characteristic of his broader practice, meaning is carried in significant part by the titles themselves — works such as The rays of light became heavy and pushed me to the ground exemplify this approach, where language and image become inseparable.

The exhibition extends beyond painting. The presentation includes Character, a multi-part sculptural project, alongside the wooden sculpture My Wound Is My Weapon. Together, the paintings and sculptures form a cohesive meditation on perception, escape, and moral responsibility in a time of war.

Yuriy Bolsa was born in 1997 in Chervonohrad (now Sheptytskyi) in Lviv Oblast. His art oeuvre is truly versatile, encompassing paintings, graphics, and collages. These works have been featured in numerous individual and group exhibitions.

Bolsa's artistic development began in an unusual and defining circumstance: a voluntary period of self-isolation lasting six years. Confined to his apartment, he developed a body of work rooted in personal narrative — exploring loneliness, self-destruction, and the observation of society through the lens of radical alienation.

Following his relocation to Kyiv, his work turned increasingly towards the socio-political. His practice began to engage with subjects that intersected directly with his own lived experience of trauma. The central preoccupation of this period became destruction and transformation — the way in which collapse can give rise to something new. During this time, he also developed an expansive ongoing project devoted to his hometown of Sheptytskyi, conceived at once as an act of place-making and as an extended series of self-portraits.

Yuriy Bolsa is a nominee of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025. He is also one of the first artists whose paintings have been digitized by the Ukrainian Fund of Digitized Art.

The UFDA collection currently holds over 900 digitised works by Yuriy Bolsa — among the largest individual holdings in the archive. These include large-scale paintings, drawings, graphic works, and collages spanning the years 2014 to 2024.

The full collection is available on the UFDA website, where anyone can view the works in full resolution — making the depth and range of Bolsa's decade-long output accessible to researchers, curators, collectors, and the general public worldwide.