"The Silent Scream" Print

Anastasiia Trehubova is a Ukrainian-Swedish painter whose work explores symbolic transformation through an expressionist lens, often blending surrealist undertones with psychological depth. A self-taught artist shaped by her father’s fascination with surrealist drawing, she developed her visual language instinctively, outside formal institutions but grounded in personal mythology. Born in Ukraine and now based between Stockholm and London, Trehubova has lived in seven countries across Europe and North America. This shifting geography, marked by continual cultural adjustment and emotional displacement, has profoundly shaped her sense of identity. Never fully at home in her country of origin and never entirely rooted in the places she arrived in, her experience of belonging has remained fluid, complex, and unresolved. These themes of alienation, transition, and inward searching weave through her paintings, not as literal narratives but as emotional undercurrents. At the core of her work lies a lifelong preoccupation with duality: structure and chaos, warmth and detachment, beauty and decay. Trehubova’s aesthetic is shaped not only by external transitions, but also by an internal tension between the formal and the intuitive. Her paintings reflect this inner dialogue, often contrasting cold and warm tones, softness and violence, the spiritual and the carnal. For her, truth exists not in resolution but in complexity, in holding contradiction without flattening it. Her career began in the corporate world, where she achieved success before a sudden, life-altering neurological injury brought everything to a halt. The near-death experience separated her from a fast-paced professional identity and forced her to reconstruct her sense of self while learning to live with brain injury. Painting, once a private instinct, became both refuge and reckoning and eventually evolved into a full-time vocation. Trehubova’s practice is rooted in acrylic, marked by layered intensity and symbolic abstraction. She often combines beauty and decay, light and shadow, emergence and erasure, identity and absence. Through bold colour, internal contradiction, and unapologetic imagery, her work captures the strange poetry of becoming.