I was born in a small town in snow-white Siberia, where April, my month of birth, is still dead of winter. I spent my childhood in colourful Ukraine, at that time still a republic of the Soviet Union. As a pupil of an art school, I met figurative art at the age of five. Since then, the portrait has not left me.

In my studies of art in Dortmund, Germany, I focused on painting (Prof. Jan Kolata) and photography (Felix Dobbert), because these two disciplines hit the portrait particularly well. In my current work, I have finally decided on painting as my primary language.

My personal path is part of my creative process. I emigrated to Germany in the early 1990s as a teenager. From this point on, return, reflection and the search for the self form both my personal and artistic focus. I painterly explore the ideas of identity and emotion, their demarcation and interaction, as well as the interaction between image and viewer.

My portraits turn inwards. Over the bridge of empathy, they involve the viewer in an individual, wordless dialogue and thus create areas for reflection and space for emotion. My pictures therefore remain deliberately “unfinished”, they want the viewer to complete the story.