ONE LESS TREE IN PARADISE
2022-2023, Painting, Acrylic, Unprimed linen canvas , Contemporary
This is a Digital Original of the artwork, digitized
using technology, and exists as a unique exemplar.
Each Digital Original is verified and secured through blockchain technology, providing full rights to exclusive digital ownership.
using technology, and exists as a unique exemplar.
Each Digital Original is verified and secured through blockchain technology, providing full rights to exclusive digital ownership.
This artwork is not available for sale at the moment, but you can submit a request to purchase it.
This work is part of the large series "A Tree of Great Height That Stands Amid the Land”, which Shcherbyna began shortly after the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out. Responding to the devastating reality around her, the artist envisions a landscape emptied of trees. Yet, the ground surrounding bare stumps remains dynamic, and few blades of grass show signs of life amid disruption. The work carries a quiet hope: while some trees fall, others continue to grow, even if beyond the part of the garden depicted within the artwork’s frame.
The motif of the growing tree recurs throughout Shcherbyna’s body of work, where the tree becomes a metaphor for a passage of generations. The roots represent ancestors, while the emerging branches embody future descendants. In keeping with this theme, she incorporates the pieces of linen cloth woven by her great-grandmother, preserving a family tradition and embedding personal history into her art.
The artwork "One Less Tree in Paradise" (2022-23) continues the narrative that began with the series "A Tree of Great Height That Stands Amid the Land" (2022). It explores the destruction caused by war—not only through human suffering but also through the suffering of the non-human world, nature itself.
Nature appears vulnerable to human actions, yet it possesses a powerful ability to regenerate. In autumn, cut branches may seem lifeless, but by spring, they begin to sprout anew. Observing this cycle of nature during wartime nurtures a sense of hope—that people, cities, and the country as a whole can also recover in a similar way. Perhaps, by closely watching nature, we can learn from it.
This idea also reflects on the miracle of Christ's resurrection. The entire series is built through the lens of the sacred—the concept of sacrifice and the yearning to believe in future healing and a new beginning. A vision where, after the horrors have passed, all people are alive again, cities stand whole, and the forest once more becomes a sanctuary. This healing becomes the central image, standing in defiance of the darkness of reality.
"The open wound of our tragedy transforms into a landscape of emptiness, a reminder of humanity’s sins. Yet this is only a fragment of the mourning for the vast losses of a world powerless to stop the abyss that rushes toward it."
Drawing on symbolism, the forest is depicted as a temple. Polina portrays a desecrated space where everything sacred and life-giving is swallowed by emptiness, thus sacralizing the tragedy itself.
In contrast to this painful sense of humanity’s march toward final catastrophe, the artist finds a space for hope. By depicting literal healing, she provokes reality into responding in kind—offering resistance to darkness.
Amid the ravaged landscape, one can notice small tufts of grass breaking through the trampled, scorched earth. The roots of a felled tree still cling firmly to the ground, as if the earth is protecting them—or perhaps, they are protecting the earth.
- Format Digital Original Standard
- Resolution 400 MPX
- Color depth
48 bit
281 Trillion Colors Original file size
1581 MB DNG File
- Country Ukraine
- Years 2022-2023
- Styles
- Medium
- Physical canvas 125cm x 200cm
- Framing No framed
Polina Shcherbyna is a Ukrainian artist whose primary medium is painting. Whether through monochrome images on linen canvas or pyrography and carving on wood, her practice always connects back to painting and its foundational principles. The central theme of Polina Shcherbyna's art, serving as the core from which other subthemes branch out, is corporeality.
Summary of Polina Shcherbyna
The artist engages with the expanded concept and perception of painting, presenting it as an object that reflects on iconography and the aesthetics of the temple. The artwork of Polina Shcherbyna is interpreted by the artist as a double view of the world of the fall of the Anthropocene idea.
Biography of Polina Shcherbyna
The artist was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1993. She studied in department of monumental painting and temple culture named after Mykola Storozhenko at NAFAA, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Polina Shcherbyna's paintings have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her solo shows have been held at Gallery DIM in Warsaw, M17 Contemporary Art Centre in Kyiv, Idealfruhstuck in Paris, and Šopa Gallery in Kosice, among other renowned venues. Moreover, she participated in group shows, such as "Materia metters" at Ukrainskyi Dim in Kyiv (2024), "Traces of timelessness" at Künstlerhaus Sootböern in Hamburg, "BRÜCHE" at HAUS KUNST MITTE in Berlin (2024), and many more.
Currently, the artist lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin.
Polina Shcherbyna's Famous Works: Exploring the Artist's Journey
Polina Shcherbyna's original paintings include "Is the Wound Healing or Growing?" (2023), "ONE LESS TREE IN PARADISE" (2022-2023), "The Winter Landscape Has Changed To — The Landscape Of Emptiness" (2023), and "Battallia of Modernity" (2023), among others.
Additionally, the artist has created numerous firing paintings and drawings on wood, and installations. These include "Branches of Great Tree (Double-Sided Work)" (2022), "The time when stones will be gather" (2023), "Overcoming the Black Spot" (2022), "Against the Darkness" (2022), and many more. Polina Shcherbyna's paintings for sale are available at auction on the UFDA website.
Polina Shcherbyna's Art Style
The artist interprets her artworks as a dual perspective on the fall of the Anthropocene concept. This duality is central to her creative process, reflected in her installations featuring double-sided artworks on wood using pyrography and carving techniques. These works often incorporate poetry sound as an additional element of the spatial-auditory perception of the work.
On one side, Polina Shcherbyna's art evokes horror and powerlessness in the face of humanity's darker aspects. On the other, her works embody faith and hope for the future.
A primary material in her practice is unprimed linen fabric glued with layers of gelatin, which preserves the fabric's crumpled curves and torn edges. This technique captures the passage of time in the form of bends and folds on the canvas. The prototype of this technical method visually is the shroud. The artist creates images with a partial loss of information, a technique that evokes the illusory nature of time and memory, reminding us that history is merely an imprint left behind.
Her practice revolves around themes of corporeality, employing anti-anatomy techniques. This exploration extends to the spiritual and physical realms of human, evolving into reflections on nature and the imagery of the tree.
In recent years, Polina Shcherbyna's arts have delved into themes of loss and the potential for healing. Drawing on deep ecology, dark vitality, and the body of war, her art examines the sacralization of death, humanity's suffering, and sacrifice in the modern world through the prism of the circle of history and Christianity.
- Resolution
- 400 MPX
- Dimensions
- 23296x17472
- Medium
- DNG
- Device
- FUJIFILM
- Device model
- GFX100S
- Lense
- FUJIFILM
- Lense model
- GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro
- Color space
- Uncalibrated
- Color profile description
- 48 bit color depth, 281 Trillion Colors
- Metering mode
- Multi-segment
- F number
- 11
- Exposure program
- Manual
- Exposure time
- 0.4
- Focal length
- 120.0 mm
- Photographer
- Digital Original Studio
