Private View | Wednesday 1 April 2026 | 6-8 pm
In Alina Zamanova’s paintings, passages of sharp focus emerge from fields of turbulent energetic brushwork, as abrupt visions amid the ceaseless influx of daily experience. Witnessing the daily aerial attacks on Kyiv, the artist documents the ways in which the ongoing war in Ukraine reshapes the human psyche and the natural landscape, tracing the deep marks that endure even in moments of perceived calm. In her paintings of children huddled together or trees bending in the wind, the stillness seems forced, the silence almost overwhelming. They are reflections on the moment after an attack – the disorienting quiet and attempts at reflection that follow the initial shock.
Writing on the nature of traumatic experience, the scholar Cathy Caruth points to its constant arrival and thus its lasting impact on life: “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” She continues, “At the core is a double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.” Avoiding direct representations of the war, Zamanova traces its toll on individual sensibility; she is interested in capturing an electric tension that permeates daily life and the exertion of holding oneself together – like a vessel pressured from within. Upright and composed, the figures in Zamanova’s paintings are still, yet invariably alert to their immediate surroundings. Reaching towards tree branches or clutching onto each other, they convey our innate search for protection and the psychological defence mechanisms against the continued pressure of unfolding events. As Zamanova notes, “The mind goes into freeze mode to protect itself. This forced stillness is something that I see in society now - forced to search for shelter, forced to not plan for the future. This is where the children are coming in.”
In After (2025), two figures of children holding on to a blanket emerge against dynamic passages of light and shadow. Removing all immediate context, Zamanova carefully delineates their expressions, transforming the painting into an image of human interiority. Two towering shadows behind the children are underscored by rapid light marks, at once evoking a blurred commotion and a sense of the children’s uncertainty. Drawing on a photograph taken after a strike on Kyiv in August 2025, the artist probes the possibility of empathy amid the relentless exposure to news images of the pain of others. Evading the shocking quality of photographs designed for fast consumption, the painting invites an extended reflection on the lives reshaped by the war at an early age.
In Zamanova’s landscapes, large ancient trees and twisted branches echo the themes of protection and concern for the future present in her portraits. Arching trunks and canopies configure into shelters, both symbolic and lived spaces of refuge, often sought during air raids. Zamanova collects fallen branches and soil from parts of Ukraine that carry personal memories, often incorporating these materials into her work or painting them from life. She refers to these objects as ‘grounded material’ as a reminder of her connection with the landscape and as a kind of living archive. Split and curving trunks in her works attest to the lasting influence of trauma yet project a sense of resistance. As the artist notes, “When I look at these works, I feel that the wind of experience is bending us really difficult, really hard, almost to the point of breaking. But the tree has persisted through different generations over its lifespan.”