Yana Sushko

Even as a child, I felt an inner urge to create - a call I didn't know how to answer at the time. Years later, after leaving traditional art education, I found my true language in abstract painting.

My works are born out of personal states - pain, loneliness, search for inner peace. They are not just emotions, but a way of being honest with myself. I capture what is difficult to put into words: the movements of the soul, its doubts, acceptance and the quest for silence within.

For me, art is a path to the depths where true recognition is possible.

Uncurated street exhibition, 2024 (unsigned artworks left in public space)

You and I

A series of geometric paintings created in 2020 during a budding relationship with my future husband. In those days, we were reading a novel by Olivia Wadsley - and it was later, when naming our first daughter Olivia, that we happened to reminisce about that time.
Each figure on these canvases is not just a form, but a reflection of inner states on the road to love: pain, frustration, despair, flashes of strength, resistance, submission. It is a dialog, a struggle, a dance between “you” and “me”-people who are striving for love, but going towards it through a complex inner landscape.

In 2024, I took these paintings out - one at a time - and left them outside an abandoned restaurant in an affluent neighborhood of the city. No signature, no explanation. After a day or two, each one disappeared. I don't know who took them.
On the back of each painting is the year “2020” and the sign of pacifica, which I have worn as a tattoo since I was 19 - a reminder of kindness to everything around me, first of all - to people.

This project is like a silent letter. About love. About searching. About giving without expectation.