Double Q Gallery is showing works by two displaced Ukrainian artists, Artem Volokitin and Maria Kulikovska, in an exhibition that highlights the war with Russia’s lasting impact on individuals and the way resilience is captured by the act of artistic creation. There are new paintings by Volokitin, a celebrated artist who exhibited at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv in 2014 and at the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Artem Volokitin was born in 1981 in Chuhuiv, Ukraine, and graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Arts and Design in 2005. Volokitin gained attention in the late 2000s for his paintings that combine the human figure with a heightened awareness of paint as a material. In his figurative work, Volokitin paints human subjects against blank backgrounds, severing any signifying context while foregrounding psychological content. In response to the turmoil and profusion of violence in his home country of Ukraine in recent years, Volokitin started to paint images of violent explosions, marking a shift in the subject matter of his paintings.
Maria Kulikovska is a Ukrainian artist who was born in 1988 in Kerch, Ukraine. She combines bodily presence in performance art, objecthood in sculptures, and her experience as an architect in her practice. Her self-casted body sculptures become the vessels for ideas of production, construction, and deconstruction as her visceral oeuvres are made from organic materials such as salt, sugar, or milk. The politically charged bodies sculpted by Kulikovska invite us to ponder on social and political issues of feminism, queer representation, war, and human rights.
Resilience: Voices of Ukraine
Duo exhibition by Artem Volokitin and Maria Kulikovska
Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong
16 March – 22 April 2023
