Always new, always intoxicating
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to annaunce Kateryna Oliinyk's solo exhibition — Always new, always intoxicating,
When wars begin, nature loses its freedom — the freedom that belongs to it by the very foundation of its own being. The dialogue between humanity and nature becomes suddenly uneven, its beauty slides into resource, its autonomy erased by human presence. When calamity recedes, beauty fills the space in which a person no longer seeks to snap its stem or claim the impulse of the wind — one only watches, and it is as though one does not exist. But does grief truly destroy beauty? Horror acts as a lens, sharpening our gaze upon the human, holding our sight in tension, turning beauty into a mist for which there is no place in a rationalized modernity. Yet beauty does not disappear. While humanity destroys iron and concrete, moonlight remains beyond the reach of attacks from the air or on the ground.
Kateryna Aliinyk's solo exhibition charts a shift in the artist's gaze. A prolonged engagement with the themes and images of war, like a bottomless well in which grief and horror never run dry — had led to an identification of the artist's identity with home, and of home, in turn, with war. Paradoxically, grief becomes easier to work with, while touching joy and beauty demands deliberate courage. It is always frightening to die, but to live with honesty and to honour beauty amid grief is perhaps even more desperate an act. The exhibition emerges from an intimate conversation between the artist and the curator, both moving through a period of re-encounter with the world — one in which prolonged absence transforms home into a fantasy they had continued to cultivate and romanticise, drifting further from reality with each passing moment. Surprisingly, a new encounter with the Lacanian Real presents itself not as emptiness, but as a beauty that fills. Not merely the kind that is brief and instantly elevating, but the kind that exists beyond the bounds of misfortune or fortune alike.
Without any wish to place oneself within it or to touch it, beauty fills — it is that life-giving fluid which flows through the veins of every human action. The dialogue between the curator and the artist opens into a polylogue with writers who matter to them across centuries: from the medieval thinker Hildegard of Bingen to the philosopher and activist of the last century Simone Weil. "To see a landscape as it is when I am not there," Weil wrote in her notebooks, wishing not to disturb the silence of earth and sky with her breath or the beating of her heart. As an interlocutor, I felt that distance, that harmonious non-presence, when the artist accompanied me through the world beside the luminaries. When she would stop before the moon and not clear away the branches obscuring its light, but remain apart for long minutes of measured contemplation from afar. So too, to the left, branches or strands of hair encircle the celestial body in the triptych Moon in Hair. Comparing scales and heights, Aliinyk captures in paint living matter and clusters of organisms. Resting in the lowlands — birds descend to the earth, while spiders, Resting in the heights drift beneath the heavens.
The exhibition includes a series of new works created over recent months — in late 2025 and early 2026. Shown in an exhibition space for the first time, the series comprises canvases depicting the sky and a single work with a ground-level scene. As the artist's thematic perspective shifts, so too do her images and forms. Earlier, her static landscapes were dense with detailed elements and humanised by artefacts of action — a stage or a fence, remnants of food or bullet casings. Now her gaze is fixed where she not only keeps her distance but cannot physically be present at all. Celestial bodies, or the sky itself as a unified and continuous dense mass, convey movement in contrast to a landscape frozen in a moment; a strong blue wind ripples the canvas itself, and the orange air is heavy with metal.
Aliinyk's beauty, as with Weil, is Kantian — an end in itself. It grows dense, materialises, yet always remains transcendent, dissolving, slipping further and further from our gaze each time. And yet every day, every minute, the ever-saturated sky meets us anew — always a new beauty.