Contemporary Ukrainian Painting

Oleksii Fishchenko

1920–2010

Oleksii Fishchenko (1920–2010) was a Ukrainian graphic artist and printmaker, a People's Artist of Ukraine, best known for large colour linocuts of Ukrainian landscape and of Kyiv. He cut his blocks in multiple boards and printed them by hand, without a press, which gave his prints an unusually dense, painterly colour. His long series «Ритми. Київ» (Rhythms. Kyiv), begun in the 1980s, is his signature cycle.

Ivan Marchuk

b. 1936

Ivan Marchuk (b. 1936) is a Ukrainian painter who invented "pliontanizm", a technique of building an image out of thousands of fine interwoven threads of paint instead of brushstrokes. He works in long cycles — among them "Voice of My Soul", "Shevchenkiana", "White Planet" and "Vienna Rhapsodies" — that move between landscape, portrait and visionary allegory.

Liubomyr Medvid

b. 1941

Liubomyr Medvid, born in 1941 in the Lviv-region village of Varyazh, is one of the leading painters of the Lviv school and a professor at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. He is a People's Artist of Ukraine and a full academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, and won the Shevchenko National Prize in 2014 for his cycle «Ремінісценції». His painting moves between meticulously observed Galician landscape and large philosophical cycles on displacement, exile and Christian ethics.

Anatolii Kryvolap

b. 1946

Anatolii Kryvolap, born 1946 in Yahotyn, is the master of Ukrainian non-figurative landscape and one of the highest-selling living Ukrainian painters. Colour is his entire subject — steppe, lake, evening, horse reduced to saturated fields of pigment — and in 2011 his canvases twice set world records for contemporary Ukrainian art at Phillips.

Yurii Lesiuk

b. 1947

Yurii Lesiuk is a Lviv painter, Honoured Artist of Ukraine, and head of the painting department at the Ivan Trush Lviv State College of Decorative and Applied Arts. His thematic canvases, landscapes, still lifes and portraits are emphatically national in character, mixing Hutsul and Pokuttia ritual and folk humour with a decorative, flattened treatment of form. He has taken part in more than ninety exhibitions and held eleven solo shows in Ukraine, Canada and the USA.

Viktor Nakonechnyi

1947–2015

Viktor Nakonechnyi was a self-taught Podillian painter, graphic artist and master of vytynanka paper-cutting and pysanka egg-painting from the embroidery village of Klembivka in Vinnytsia Oblast. He fused Ukrainian folk painting traditions with academic oil and tempera technique to build an enormous body of ethnographic village scenes, and won Ukraine's highest artistic honour, the Shevchenko National Prize, in 2009.

Viktor Hvozdynskyi

b. 1951

Viktor Vyacheslavovych Hvozdynskyi (born 25 February 1951 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi) is a Ukrainian painter, watercolourist and monumental artist who has worked in Rivne since 1975 and has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 1985. He is best known for watercolour and oil landscapes of Volyn, Polissia, the Carpathians and Central Europe, and for stained glass made with his wife Larysa Hvozdynska.

Mykola Ovsiiko

b. 1954

Mykola Ovsiiko (b. 1954, Chernihiv Oblast) is an Odesa-based Ukrainian painter working almost entirely in landscape and still life. His pictures are noted for their quiet, narrative undercurrent and unorthodox painterly solutions rather than straight description. He was made a Merited Artist of Ukraine in 2018.

Ihor Havryshkevych

b. 1955

Ihor Havryshkevych is a Lviv painter, People's Artist of Ukraine, and for fifteen years the director of the Lychakiv Cemetery museum-reserve. His painting builds stylised figures and open, unmixed colour into large historical cycles — 'Along the Paths of Taras Shevchenko', 'Ancestors' and 'Along Cossack Trails' — that came out of his journeys across Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Haiane Ataian

b. 1959

Haiane Ataian is a Kyiv painter born in 1959, the youngest daughter of the Ukrainian painter Tetiana Yablonska and the Armenian-Ukrainian painter Armen Ataian. She works almost entirely in easel landscape, much of it painted on location in and around Kyiv and at the Sedniv artists' residence. Her works are held by the National Museum "Kyiv Art Gallery" and by regional museums in Khmelnytskyi and Zaporizhzhia.

Serhii Komornyi

b. 1963

Serhii Komornyi (b. 1963, Chuhuiv) is a Kharkiv-based Ukrainian artist who works almost entirely in pastel on large-format paper, in a manner that sits between drawing and painting. He paints psychological portraits, plein-air landscapes and still lifes with a bright impressionist palette.

Oleh Shupliak

b. 1967

Oleh Shupliak (b. 1967, Bishche, Ternopil Oblast) is an Honoured Artist of Ukraine best known for his 'dvovzory' — double-image paintings in which a landscape or genre scene resolves, at a second glance, into a portrait. He has been called the Ukrainian Salvador Dalí.

Nadiia Poluian-Vnukova

b. 1968

Nadiia Poluian-Vnukova is a Ukrainian painter born in Romny, Sumy Oblast, in 1968 and still living and working there, a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2004. Trained first as a decorative painter and textile designer, she paints minutely detailed, sunlit interiors, still lifes of wild flowers in ceramic jugs, and scenes of Christmas and childhood in her native Romny district.

Ihor Khilko

b. 1969

Ihor Khilko (b. 1969, Sokyriany) is a Ukrainian painter, icon restorer and academic based in Chernivtsi. He paints Carpathian landscapes, still lifes and seasonal subjects in a figurative, light-driven manner, and has restored icons of the Dniester Bukovyna region. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and an associate professor at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University.

Yurii Vatkin

b. 1975

Yurii Vatkin is a Kharkiv-based abstract painter who moved from realism through expressionism to a colour-driven abstraction rooted in nature. He works in thick, visually tactile impasto strokes, treating each canvas as a record of his emotional state at the moment of painting. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2008, he has exhibited in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Prague, London, Milan, Luxembourg, Glasgow and New York.

Olha Kvasha

b. 1976

Olha Kvasha is a contemporary Ukrainian painter born in Lutsk in 1976 and based in Lviv, a 1999 graduate of the Lviv Academy of Arts. She paints dreamlike, faintly naive Ukrainian landscapes — orchards, snowy village streets, river valleys and hillsides — in which an ordinary scene is tilted toward fairy tale.

Anna Yarmoliuk

b. 1977

Anna Yarmoliuk is a Ukrainian self-taught painter born in 1977, reported to live in Kharkiv and to work as a librarian. She paints small naive-art scenes in oil pastel on paper and cardboard — snowy streets, wooded roads, women and children walking with dogs — with a warm, lyrical view of unhurried small-town life.

Kateryna Kosianenko

b. 1978

Kateryna Kosianenko is a Kyiv painter and icon-painter whose figurative work fuses Ukrainian Baroque iconography with Renaissance composition and an impressionist feel for landscape light. Honoured Artist of Ukraine (2019) and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2002, she works almost entirely in themed series. She has held more than 35 solo exhibitions and won first prize in painting at the 100th Salon d'Automne in Paris (2003).

Oleh Savka

b. 1978

Oleh Savka is a contemporary Ukrainian painter, designer and architect who lives in the old town of Kyiv and paints its streets, courtyards and churches with a palette knife. Trained as a furniture and interior designer, he turned intensively to painting in 2022 and by early 2026 had completed some ninety-nine canvases.

Vira Kavura

b. 1978

Vira Kavura is a Kyiv-based artist who works almost exclusively in soft pastel, and mainly with flowers. She paints from live bouquets in natural light, building each composition around a dominant bloom, and has produced more than three hundred realist floral pastels. She is an associate artist of Unison Colour and teaches pastel technique through video courses and international workshops.

Oleksandr Shandor

b. 1981

Oleksandr Shandor (born 1981 in Vynohradiv, Transcarpathia) is a Ukrainian landscape and still-life painter of the Transcarpathian school, working in oil in a warm impressionist manner. He joined the folk creative association "Verkhovynskyi Khudozhnyk" in 2007 and the youth union "Artists of Transcarpathia" in 2012.

Serhii Poliakov

b. 1982

Serhii Poliakov (b. 1982) is a Kyiv-based Ukrainian painter known for atmospheric cityscapes of Kyiv — Khreshchatyk, Bessarabska Square, the Dnipro bridges — as well as portraits and historical battle scenes. He paints in oil with heavy layering and expressive brushwork drawn from the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

Anton Lohov

b. 1984

Anton Lohov (b. 1984, Rozdilna, Odesa Oblast) is a Kyiv-based Ukrainian artist working in painting, objects and installation. His practice moves between abstraction and industrial imagery — power lines, mine shafts, depots, climate control — and since 2022 has turned directly to the Russian invasion, including paintings made on salvaged air-defence missile containers. He teaches installation at the School of Contemporary Art in Kyiv.

Denys Horodnychyi

b. 1984

Denys Horodnychyi (b. 1984) is a Ukrainian landscape painter based in Poltava. He works in oil on canvas and cardboard, mostly at small scale, on the rivers, fields and coastlines of Ukraine and occasional Mediterranean subjects. His stated aim is to catch the changing states and moods of nature rather than to describe a place.

Vladyslav Zadvorskyi

b. 1984

Vladyslav Zadvorskyi (b. 1984, Shpola) is a Ukrainian painter based in Irpin near Kyiv who works in an impressionist and realist idiom. He paints landscapes, portraits and figurative compositions, and since 2022 has documented the wartime history of Irpin.

Mariia Holub

b. 1990

Mariia Holub is a Ukrainian painter based in Cherkasy, born in 1990, who studied painting, graphics and design at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. She paints in acrylic on canvas, combining magical realism with op-art and pixel-like patterning in vivid, near-fluorescent colour. The Cherkasy Regional Art Museum gave her a solo exhibition, «Мереживо нескінченності» (Lace of Infinity), in 2022.

Yevhen Cherniakovskyi

b. 1993

Yevhen Cherniakovskyi (listed commercially as Evgeny Chernyakovsky) is a Ukrainian painter born in 1993 who studied at K. D. Ushynskyi university in Odesa. He works in thick, high-impasto oils on canvas, returning repeatedly to water lilies, ponds and river surfaces in a broadly impressionist manner.

Zlata Shyshman

b. 1995

Zlata Shyshman is a contemporary Ukrainian painter from Izmail, working in Odesa. Born in 1995 into the family of the Merited Artist of Ukraine Ivan Shyshman, she paints plein-air landscapes, Odesa courtyards and streets, still lifes and portraits in a bright, sunlit contemporary impressionism, and has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2018.

Orest Kuziv

b. 1997

Orest Kuziv is a Ukrainian painter born in 1997 in Ivano-Frankivsk, and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Working chiefly in oil, he is known for nocturnal landscapes and for a long-running series of paintings of haystacks. He describes himself as an impressionist and has produced more than a thousand works.

Maksym Polyvianyi

b. 1999

Maksym Polyvianyi (b. 1999, Kharkiv Oblast) is a Ukrainian painter of near-monochrome, minimalist landscapes in acrylic. He paints the Ukrainian village at dusk and at night — a lit window, a stork's nest, fog in a hollow — reducing each scene to a few tonal values.

Anatolii Misiuk

Anatolii Misiuk is a contemporary Ukrainian landscape painter working in Lviv. He paints wide, luminous skies, cloudscapes and quiet cityscapes in oil and acrylic on canvas, and is also a doctoral researcher at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, where he studies abstraction in Ukrainian postmodern painting.

Mykola Yatsurak

Mykola Yatsurak is a Ukrainian painter from Velykyi Kliuchiv in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, now living in Kolomyia, where he teaches at the Yaroslav Pstrak Art School. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, he paints Hutsul village life, weddings and Carpathian landscapes.

Ilona Shymchyts

Ilona Shymchyts is a Ukrainian painter and relief-carver from the Borshchiv district of Ternopil Oblast, trained at the Lviv National Academy of Arts and based in Lviv. Her work moves between geometric abstraction in acrylic on paper and quiet, meditative rural landscapes in which village architecture carries a sense of calm and rootedness. She has shown in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Borshchiv as well as in Canada and Poland.

Oleksandr Shcherbyna

Oleksandr Shcherbyna is a contemporary Ukrainian painter and pastellist based in Odesa who sells internationally through Saatchi Art, where he has listed work since 2017. He paints small-format landscapes, seasonal studies and still lifes in oil on canvas and pressed cardboard, and works extensively in pastel on paper.