IRYNA AKIMOVA
Location:
Kyiv, Ukraine
ARTIST BIO
Iryna Akimova is a contemporary Ukrainian artist who lives and works in Kyiv. She graduated from Kharkov State University (Ukraine), where she got her PhD degree. Iryna started her professional artistic career 15 years ago after having vast experience as a University professor, director of an NGO, and parliamentarian. “Going into the arts constituted an unexpected turn on my life path. However, it brought an enormous excitement and unleashed my creativity “. Some of her art projects were inspired by political problems and addressed social injustice. Later, she concentrated on studying the roots of individuality in the formation of subjective perceptions of reality. She creates her pictures as reflections of human feelings and emotions. Her professional advancement was noted by famous Ukrainian artist Ivan Marchuk, who called Iryna a new star in the Ukrainian contemporary art family.
She is fond of «exercises de style» and experiments. She often presents her expressionistic paintings along with impressive abstract and surrealistic experiments. She started in painting and then went into installations, video animation, and performance to achieve a multidimensional effect.
She had ten solo exhibitions, and took part in 50+ national and international group exhibitions, She received awards at several international art contests. Some of her pictures were successfully sold at Phillips auction in London, and several artworks entered museums and private collections in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, and China.
Iryna is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Five years ago, she founded the Ukrainian Association of Feminine Research in the Arts (UAFRA) and established an annual Women’sArtFest to advocate gender equality in the arts.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Iryna Akimova is a Ukrainian contemporary artist from Kyiv. She converts abstract concepts and general human emotions into a set of bright visual images with their own characters and stories in her artworks. She creates her artworks as snapshots of human emotions. Both conventional landscapes and surrealistic portraits contain philosophical interpretations of the emotional links between people and nature. Many of Iryna’s artworks lead the viewers to the world of allegory, inspiring a search for the hidden senses behind the familiar objects. She develops her own expressionistic style with a surrealistic touch to reflect the non-linearity of human perceptions.