A Shared Silence

Veronika Kyrychenko is a Ukrainian artist and independent researcher based in Dnipro, Ukraine. Her practice is rooted in abstract painting and has expanded into a broader exploration of colour, materiality, memory, human presence and the ways in which art responds to a changing world. She is particularly interested in how lived experience enters a painting through colour, physical matter, gesture and the relationships that emerge within pictorial space.Before devoting herself fully to art, Kyrychenko worked in science and education. She studied Biology and Botany, later Practical Psychology, and holds a PhD in Human and Animal Physiology. This background continues to shape her approach to art through close observation, sustained attention to materials and an interest in processes that cannot always be understood from their visible results alone.A continuing thread in Kyrychenko’s practice is an interest in what happens to art when the world around it changes. The experience of the pandemic and, more recently, the rapid development of artificial intelligence have sharpened her attention to changing conditions of artistic practice and to questions surrounding the role of the artist. Alongside her own studio work, she studies historical painting techniques and works closely with other artists, encountering their questions, choices and experiences with materials. Together, these perspectives inform an ongoing interest in where art is moving, how the role of the artist is changing, and what kinds of knowledge and experience may remain essential along the way.Since 2022, living and working in Dnipro during the war in Ukraine has inevitably become part of Kyrychenko’s life and artistic record. Her series Chronicles of War belongs directly to this period, recording changes in perception, emotional experience and the sense of time as they were lived.Her current series, Living Presence, turns towards human relationships. Figures appear alone and together, approach one another or maintain a distance. The paintings explore loneliness and the need for others, intimacy and personal space, and the possibility of being together without intruding upon another person’s inner world. At the centre of the series is a simple but increasingly complex question: what does the presence of another person mean in our lives? The figures remain partially absorbed by colour and painterly space, allowing relationships to be sensed rather than explained.Material is another important part of Kyrychenko’s practice. Working primarily in oil, she has spent years observing pigments, binders, mediums, grounds and painting tools, while studying historical approaches to their use. Her sustained engagement with artists and materials led to the development of the Material Memory Project, an independent research initiative concerned with the disappearance of artists’ materials and the practical knowledge associated with them. It examines how knowledge formed through artistic practice can be documented, preserved and transmitted.Kyrychenko’s work has been presented internationally, including exhibitions in Florence, Genoa, Milan and Madrid. Her paintings are held in private collections in Spain, Italy, Germany, the United States and Japan. She continues to live and work in Dnipro, where painting remains at the centre of a wider practice shaped by sustained observation - of materials, of other people, and of a world whose conditions are continually changing.