"Ukrainian summer" Painting

Kateryna Ivonina is a Ukrainian artist and she lives in the USA from the end of 2021 "Perception transforms the way we recognize and project meaning onto the world around us. In my artistic practice, I am interested in the relationship between human beings and nature, and in how natural forms are transformed through memory, projection, symbolism, and cultural interpretation. Working primarily through still life and landscape, I move between abstraction and figuration, treating both not as fixed categories but as oscillating conditions of perception. Familiar forms shift between object and body, image and presence, the tangible and the imagined. I am particularly interested in the anthropomorphic nature of seeing — in the human tendency to recognize ourselves in the world around us, projecting emotions, narratives, and identities onto forms that exist beyond us. Through this process, painting becomes less a form of representation and more a way of revealing how meaning itself is constructed. Optics plays a central role in my work. I create images at the level of the gaze, in a space shaped by memory, associations, bodily experience, and unstable perception. Repetition, variation, and subtle displacement allow ordinary imagery to move beyond stable definition, creating visual situations where fluid identities and shifting meanings can emerge. My work is also rooted in an ongoing reflection on the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature — how deeply human creativity, culture, and systems of meaning are shaped by natural forms, while at the same time transforming them through interpretation and intervention. I am interested in this tension: in the fragile balance between intimacy and alienation, creation and destruction, recognition and distortion. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, my work remains open, existing in a constant oscillation between abstraction and figuration, materiality and illusion, familiarity and ambiguity."