Lesia Khomenko's Work Enters the Collection of the University of Pennsylvania

Lesia Khomenko's painting A Frame from Video Footage of a Kamikaze Drone at the Tree Line (2025) has been acquired by the Penn Art Collection, one of the most prestigious university collections in the United States, comprising over 8,000 works gathered over 250 years. The University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League institution and one of the oldest and most distinguished research universities.

The work, was made from a frame of open-source video footage taken at the frontline of the Russian-Ukrainian war, capturing a Russian soldier concealed behind a tree, filmed by a drone flying at low altitude. The semi-abstract visual language of the painting is a response to the noise and instability of the original image. Through it, Khomenko examines the radicalized vision of martial optics where the human figure becomes entangled with the technical apparatus of the drone and bridges the tradition of battle painting with the vast archive of digital testimonies documenting this historical moment in real time.
The work is currently on loan from the Collection of Harlan Stone and is now part of the Penn Art Collection's.

14 August 2026