Lesia Vasylchenko wins PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025 main award

Lesia Vasylchenko is the main prize winner of the 8th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, a nationwide prize for Ukrainian artists aged 35 or younger. Vasylchenko was awarded 400,000 UAH (about 10,000 USD) and will automatically be shortlisted for the next edition of the Future Generation Art Prize—a worldwide contemporary art prize. Offering a view into the artistic practices of the next generation of Ukrainian artists, the PinchukArtCentre prize gives support and a platform for young Ukrainian artists to create new works with the full institutional support of the art centre. During the award ceremony, the artist announced that she would donate the entire prize sum to charitable contributions in support of the army.

Kateryna Aliinyk received the first Special prize for her work, and Yevhen Korshunov won the second Special prize as well as the Public Prize Award. In addition to 100,000 UAH (2,400 USD). The winners will also receive financial support for internships, further education, residences or new production. 

This year, a special recognition outside the competition was dedicated to the memory of Veronika Kozhushko—a young artist from Kharkiv who applied for the Prize but tragically died on August 30, 2024 as a result of a Russian missile strike targeting residential areas and public spaces in Kharkiv.

The winners were selected by a distinguished international jury consisting of Carina Bukuts, curator and writer, curator at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; Marta Czyź, art historian, independent curator and critic, curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024; Björn Geldhof, Artistic Director of the PinchukArtCentre; Alevtina Kakhidze, artist; and Lesia Khomenko, artist, co-founder of the R.E.P. group and the Hudrada collective. 

The PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025 Award Ceremony was opened by Björn Geldhof, Artistic Director of the PinchukArtCentre, who called for a moment of silence to honour the memory of all those who have lost their lives in this war.

The founder of the Prize, businessman and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk, addressed the audience: “Ukrainian art today is a weapon. We have presented the works of Ukrainian artists at major and politically significant events—in Washington, in Davos during the World Economic Forum, in Munich during the Security Conference—and I have seen heads of governments, heads of states, moved to tears. We need their emotions because those emotions influence their decisions. And as a result, we received more weapons.”

While introducing Lesia Vasylchenko, winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025, the jury stated: “The jury awards the main prize to Lesia Vasylchenko for a physically impressive while poetic work that elegantly creates a study of the Ukrainian sky—a symbol that in this realization becomes simultaneously a space of longing, trauma and hope.

The sky—once a space of freedom—becomes a backdrop for disasters, but also a space of memory and contemplation. With poetic editing and a sense of rhythm, the artist tells of a world that is changing before our eyes from 1918 till this very day—not through violent images, but through their absence, through silence, through light and shadow.

The work subtly raises urgent questions about authorship, futurity, and the algorithmic construction of historical narrative. The jury was particularly impressed by the installation’s conceptual rigour, technological sophistication, and deep emotional resonance, offering a contemplative yet urgent response to historical rupture, one that bridges intimacy with scale, and the human with the planetary.”

Björn Geldhof, Artistic Director of the PinchukArtCentre added: “We were also very humbled by the fact that the main prize winner committed to donating all the funds she received back to the army, which deeply moved the audience and all present.”

Commenting on the work by first special prize winner Kateryna Aliinyk, the jury said: “Kateryna Aliinyk is awarded the first Special Prize for her work that is a moving emotional record in which painting becomes a tool of memory, mourning and resistance. The artist, born in Luhansk, addresses the loss of her home as an unattainable landscape charged with an eerie intimacy—wild boars, dense clouds, insects and rustling tree roots—each scene rendered with such precision and quiet unease that the viewer feels like an uninvited witness.

In creating a visual language for tenderness under duress, Aliinyk offers a quietly radical proposition: that even in the most volatile environments, the search for connection remains.”

Awarding Yevhen Korshunov, the second special prize, the jury said: “Yevhen Korshunov is awarded the second Special prize for a work that is a unique record of everyday wartime life seen from the inside. His drawings and anecdotes render the anonymous figure of the soldier visible, individual, and human. They reveal, through a male gaze, a tenderness expressing quiet gestures of care under duress of a military training—and on the quiet, vital space art can inhabit, in the shadow of war.

The jury is humbled by his ability to create and remain an artist while being a soldier. Describing honestly and filled with humour, humanity under straining conditions. His work embodies the transition of men, their bodies, their goals and functions.”

The public choice prize of UAH 40 000 (around 1,000 USD) has gone to Yevhen Korshunov. The winner of this category was chosen by a vote by visitors to the PinchukArtCentre of 2282 visitors. 

The shortlist of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025 includes: Mykhailo Alekseenko (34, Kyiv), Kateryna Aliinyk (25, Kyiv/Luhansk), Yuriy Bolsa (27, Chervonohrad), Vasyl Dmytryk (32, Ivano-Frankivsk/Odesa), Maksym Khodak (23, Vienna/Kyiv/Bila Tserkva), Yevhen Korshunov (35, Brovary/Kyiv), Kateryna Lysovenko (34, Kyiv/Vienna), Krystyna Melnyk (30, Kyiv/Melitopol), Daria Molokoiedova (22, Kramatorsk/Kyiv), Vladislav Plisetskiy (25, Kyiv), Andrii Rachynskyi (34, Kharkiv), Anton Saenko (34, Sumy/Kyiv), Anton Shebetko (34, Kyiv/Amsterdam), Zhenia Stepanenko (28, Kyiv/Berlin), Vasyl Tkachenko (Lyakh) (29, Mariupol), Illia Todurkin (23, Mariupol/Kyiv), Tamara Turliun (29, Dnipro/Kyiv), Lesia Vasylchenko (34, Kyiv/Oslo), Yuri Yefanov (34, Gurzuf) and collective Variable Name (Valerie Karpan (Kyiv) and Maryna Marynychenko (Kyiv/Zaporizhzhia)).

The show of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025 is curated by Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, curator of the PinchukArtCentre alongside assistant curators, Oksana Chornobrova and Kateryna Kostenko. It is open until July 13, 2025.

Established by the PinchukArtCentre in 2009, the PinchukArtCentre Prize is a biannual nationwide contemporary art prize for Ukrainian artists aged 35 or younger. It is the first private art prize in Ukraine to discover, recognise, and give long-term support to a new generation of emerging Ukrainian artists.

By setting up the Prize, the PinchukArtCentre strives to raise interest in contemporary art among Ukrainians and to form, by providing support for the creation of new artworks, a critical mass of new-generation artists who will be successful on both national and international art scenes. In addition, the PinchukArtCentre Prize is contributing to converting Kyiv into one of the world’s leading cultural hubs.