A Sunflower Is a Small Sun. From the Series "Daily Oxymoron"

Zhenya Machkovska is a Ukrainian artist whose work explores how a person coexists with their own experience and how emotions shape the perception of reality.

Zhenya Machkovska’s art has been showcased in Ukrainian and international exhibitions since 2021. She has participated in more than 10 solo and group shows. 

The artist was born in 1999 in Dnipro, Ukraine. From 2014 to 2018, she studied at the Dnipro Theatre and Art College, Faculty of Fine Arts.

Later, from 2018 to 2022, she continued her education at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, Faculty of Fine Arts and Restoration.

In 2020, her work was presented in the international project “Anticipation + Immunity” at the Korsaks' Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art. The same year, her paintings were featured in the online young art auction “Breathe” at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

In 2022, Machkovska’s works were included in the charity online auction of the project “Fight With Art” organised by FestivALT (Kraków, Poland).

In 2023, she participated in the DCCC Young Artists Residency in Dnipro. In 2024, she created three reflection-based works specially for the poetry publication An Asterisk Zine.

Atrwork of Zhenya Machkovska has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the solo exhibition “The Gaze” at Siaivo Knyhy Bookstore, Kyiv (2021); the Ukrainian-Georgian group exhibition “Tomorrow” at the Literary Museum, Tbilisi (2022); the solo exhibition “Daily Oxymoron” at Malevich Art Bar, Kyiv (2023); and the multimodal art event ONLY AFTER DARK, organised by Peremoga Business Space & Art Navigator Academy, Kyiv (2025), among others.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Kyiv. 

The artist works with mixed media — acrylic, aerosols, markers, liners, and pencils. This allows her to create layered, expressive compositions that visualize a person’s inner world.

Zhenya Machkovska’s original paintings include Fusion and Separation, Lost in Thoughts, Just Remember, Little Joys of Life, Home, Peaceful Sleep, and many others. UFDA has digitized more than 20 works by the artist, which are now available to the public on the website.

Machkovska’s art functions as a diary of inner states, emotions, and personal transformations. She investigates themes of self-awareness, memory, and inner dialogue, seeking to capture moments of fragility, tension, or stillness that often go unnoticed yet shape identity. Though personal in origin, she believes these experiences resonate with the viewer and become collective.

In her practice, Zhenya explores how a person coexists with their own experience and how emotions influence the perception of reality. Her work emerges at the intersection of the intuitive and the reflective. The characters in her paintings often exist on the boundary between reality and metaphor, between the visible and the felt.

Although rooted in personal experience, her themes extend beyond it. The artist is interested in the universality of certain internal conditions — how memory, trauma, or love affect the way we perceive the world and ourselves within it. Her art becomes a space for exploring this threshold, where the individual intertwines with the collective.

Machkovska’s work is not only a form of personal expression but also a space for dialogue: she seeks for the viewer not only to see, but to feel — to recognize themselves and their own states within the image.