Bohdan Kohanovsky

Bohdan Kohanovsky is a young Ukrainian artist working primarily in figurative painting.

The artist was born in 2002 in Rivne. He began his creative practice in 2022, and since then, the artwork of Bohdan Kohanovsky has been featured in several exhibitions, including the Rivne Vernissage at Fusion Coffee Shop, the charitable exhibition On the Totem, and Ad Fontes at the Hnat Khotkevych Palace of Culture in Lviv.

In his practice, the artist works with oil and acrylic paints, as well as dry and oil pastels.

Among Bohdan Kohanovsky's original paintings are Psychotic (2026), Miasma / The Healthy Adult (2026), Lost Inner Child (2025), Loss. The Study of Human Pain (2025), Farewell (2024), Trust (2024), and many others.

UFDA has digitised nine works by the artist, now available in the highest resolution on the fund's website.

Kohanovsky approaches painting as a means of enduring internal pressure — less concerned with "themes" than with states: inner control, dependency, anxiety, the helplessness of closeness, loss, and the attempt to exist amid internal or external collapse. For him, painting becomes a way to live through and externalise what would otherwise accumulate and destroy from within.

At the centre of his work is the human figure — not as a specific individual or self-portrait, but as an instrument of emotional expression. His figures are often impersonal, distorted, or stripped of clear identity. Kohanovsky is drawn to psychological tension, vulnerability, imperfection, and the inner conflict that many people carry in silence. Through figurative imagery, he seeks to create an honest — and at times uncomfortable — dialogue with the viewer. What he pursues in his practice is the moment of recognition: when a person confronts what they ordinarily flee from, or what they try to conceal even from themselves.

Risk, experimentation, and emotional honesty are central to his practice. Kohanovsky sees art not as an attempt to create a perfect image, but as an opportunity to capture a living human condition in all its fragility, contradiction, and tension.