Elena Rudichenko

I paint the living being in the presence of death — not death as a symbol, a skull set on a shelf, but as a state that is felt and met. Thirty years with my hand on other people's centuries taught me the language of aged surfaces: craquelure, patina, the way a figure half-dissolves back into time. I build that age into my own panels, so each work seems recovered rather than made. My subjects are calm before what they hold. Body, love, death and the sacred are not separate territories to me — they are one thing, spoken in oil, in mosaic, and in gold.
A·GATA is the studio name of Elena Rudichenko, a Philadelphia-based painter and master art restorer with nearly thirty years of experience. Trained at the Suzdal Art and Restoration School in the conservation of easel oil painting and Russian tempera icons, she later earned a degree as a fine-art expert from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and served as Conservation Administrator at the National Museum of History of Ukraine. After a decade restoring icons and Old Master paintings for Manhattan galleries, she now creates her own work — contemporary vanitas and micro-mosaic — under the mark A·GATA.

Suzdal Art and Restoration School, Russia — Fine Art Restorer of Easel Oil Painting (1991–1996)

National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, Kyiv, Ukraine — Fine Art Expert / Critic (2003–2008)

National Restoration Center of Ukraine — Advanced Conservation Training (2006, 2012)