Lesia Khomenko and Her School

Voloshyn Gallery presents Lesia Khomenko’s personal project, "Lesia Khomenko and Her School". According to the artist, this exhibition is about trust, self-irony and the issue of current state of Ukrainian education.

For her new series, Lesia Khomenko collaborated with students from Kyiv Academy of Media Arts’ ‘Contemporary Art’ course, where she is a tutor. Yet it is difficult to call this joint effort a collaboration, since the artist works from photographs that were sent by her students in response to her request. She didn’t directly involve them in the process. Throughout this process, Khomenko studies her own identity and identities of young artists. While working with their portraits, the artist transforms her attitude towards her students: instead of analyzing them as young artists subjects, which are in the same coordinate system as her, Khomenko objectifies them, relying not on her personal opinion, but solely on the images that they have sent.

Within Voloshyn Gallery’s exhibition space, Lesia Khomenko will present an installation of paintings, where she will continue to deconstruct the figurative imagery and analysis of all elements of the painting. Deconstruction in Lesia Khomenko’s practice requires not only working with visual imagery, but with all the painting’s components, including its material aspects. Thus, in her new series the artist reaches maximum elasticity of canvas by using synthetic canvas, biflex fabric and synthetic acrylics. This allows the artist to transform one of her favourite processes of mounting canvas onto a frame into the main ‘sense creative’ part, since it becomes an instrument in deformation of depicted figures. Apart from that, the frame itself, as a rule, is left an invisible and a marginal part of the painting. It is often either subjected to replacement, or the process of mounting is carried out without the artist being present. "Lesia Khomenko and Her School" project draws viewer's attention to the monotonous, technical process of producing and framing an artwork, which becomes a self-sufficient artistic gesture, which ultimately determines the image.

Lesia Khomenko was born in 1980 in Kyiv, where she lives and works. She graduated from National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in 2004. Since 2004 she is a co-founder and member of R.E.P. group. Between 2005 and 2006 she participated in a residency at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. In 2008 she took part in the LIA residency (Leipzig International Art Programme) in Leipzig, Germany. Since 2008 she is a member of a curatorial group HUDRADA. Her works have been displayed in many personal and group exhibitions, among which are the main project for Kyiv Biennale Arsenale (2012), as well as exhibitions in National Art Museum of Ukraine, White Box Gallery in New York, MUMOK in Vienna and Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw.