Barrier

Yevheniia Hryhoryan is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist from Kyiv. Her works have been exhibited widely in Ukraine and abroad.

In her practice, Yevheniia explores themes of corporeality, ecology, feminism, and psychology, questioning established notions of norms, boundaries, and the nature of change.

The artist was born in 1983. She studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kyiv (1998–2000). She continued her education at the Kyiv National Economic University (2000–2005) and the Institute of Psychodrama, PAfE, Kyiv (2018–2020). She also attended Classes of Classical Portrait (2019–2020) and Classes of Contemporary Portrait (2019–2022) in Kyiv, the School of Land Art at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAOMA) (2024), and the course “Contemporary Art,” SKVOT (2025).

Yevheniia worked as a marketing specialist for a long time, but in 2019, she decided to change her path and become an artist. Since then, she has devoted herself entirely to art.

Yevheniia Hryhoryan’s art practice is marked by participation in various residencies, including “The World Through the Eyes of an Artist” (Ukraine, 2020), Art Circle International (Slovenia, 2023), Kilowac (Lithuania, 2024), DFEWA (Romania, 2024), and Serendipity, Art Laboratory, Port of Culture (Ukraine, 2024–2025).

Yevheniia Hryhoryan’s paintings have been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Ukraine and abroad. Her solo shows include “Shame” at the Korsaks’ Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art in Lutsk (2025), “Nudes” at Svitlo Gallery in Lviv (2025), “Body” at Modern City Hub in Zaporizhzhia (2024), “Body” at Center for Contemporary Art in Ivano-Frankivsk (2024), and “Invisible” at Brama Gallery in Cherkasy (2023). 

Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions such as Setouchi Triennale at Sakaide Civic Art Museum in Kagawa (2025), “Anthropocene: observation of I” at Museum of the History of Kyiv in Kyiv (2025), “The Time of Preappointed Events” at Modern city hub in Zaporizhzhia (2025), “Small Body” at Eye sea gallery in Kyiv (2024), “Unbreakable” at UIMA in Chicago (2024), and many more.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. 

The artist works with painting, installation, bioart, and site-specific approaches.

Yevheniia Hryhoryan’s original paintings include The Last Act of Faith (2025), Self-portrait (2024), Barrier (2023), Weight (2022), Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2025), and Human Becomes Earth. Earth becomes Human (2025), among others. 

In the project Shame, she considers shame not as a fleeting emotion but as a mode of existence — one that changes form over time, penetrates movements and gazes, and determines how one occupies space. The project explores the shame of presence — a state in which the body loses its separateness and becomes part of a collective, vulnerable matter.

In the exhibition NAKED, Yevheniia investigates corporeality as a vulnerable shell of experience — intimate, collective, and historical. In a series of paintings, she works with the image of the body as a space of silence, shame, fear, and exhaustion — feelings that shape “nakedness” as a state rather than merely a physical form. The exhibition combines personal sensitivity with the experience of war, in which the body is not only a participant but also a witness.

The project (BIO)FORM is an attempt to imagine the collective body of a future society, where traditional gender roles lose their meaning. Yevheniia Hryhoryan uses SCOBY biofilm as a medium — a skin-like material created through the symbiosis of bacteria and yeast. Its nature lies in the ability to grow as long as the container allows, turning the fungus into a metaphor for the evolution of society.

Yevheniia considers the body as a space shaped by experience, culture, and memory. Central to her practice is the collision of the personal and the collective, the physical and the emotional, the biological and the social.

Through experiments with form and materials, Yevheniia explores vulnerability as a resource, loss as experience, and art as an act of transformation.

As the artist herself notes, in her practice, memory does not exist apart from matter — it grows through it, like roots breaking through the concrete of time. She works at the boundary of the corporeal and the metaphorical, using materials as carriers of memory that resist oblivion.

The artist emphasizes that she is interested in the body not as an anatomical structure, but as a topography of experience. In figurative painting, the figure emerges not as an image but as a fragment of a state, as a witness through which something deeper — older than words — comes forth. Natural processes — fermentation, transformation of states, the passage of time — are, for her, ways of engaging with that which cannot be controlled. Like a body that still remembers when consciousness can no longer speak. This threshold — when shame grows into landscape, into gesture, into the very fabric of reality — becomes a space of inquiry.

Her feminist stance manifests through the study of the stigmatization and sexualization of the female form, of corporeality as a space of vulnerability, tension, and exposure. She seeks to redefine the body — not as an object, but as a place. As a point of contact between emotion and matter, between self-perception and the world.