Lesia Khomenko: Imagined Distance

The exhibition Imagined Distance unfolds as both a journey through the recent history of Ukraine and an exploration of Lesia Khomenko’s own artistic development. Bringing together more than fifty works, it traces her trajectory from her early paintings in 2005 to the most recent works created today. Across twenty-five years of practice, Khomenko has persistently challenged herself to discover new ways of addressing both form and subject, constructing an artistic language that critically rethinks visual soviet heritage and turns to the traditions of Ukrainian painting, and deliberately resists to be confined by it.

Throughout the exhibition, Khomenko’s signature style remains unmistakable—broad, decisive brushstrokes and a distinctive palette that together grant each work a singular presence. While she challenges the limits of medium of painting itself, her vocabulary transforms together with her subject matter that is inseparable from her environment: a profound engagement with Ukraine, its people, and its most recent history. In her canvases, one encounters a critical reflection on society, personal stories, as well as an articulation of collective experience.

Rooms function as liminal spaces, suspended between distinct historical moments, where different moments in time are brought into dialogue. This curatorial strategy consciously produces a field of tension, compelling the visitor to wander across temporal thresholds in Ukraine’s history. The opening of the exhibition stages such a collision between two temporalities: the protests of pre-Maidan Ukraine (series Mixed Feelings, 2013) and the current full-scale war (Injured Russian Soldier, 2024). In this juxtaposition, society is shown as both divided and united, fragile and resilient. It is precisely in the interval between these works that a conceptual gap emerges—a liminal space that invites reflection on the writing of history, its artistic reflection and the imagining of possible futures. Such oscillations between temporal registers are consistent throughout the exhibition, resisting linear narration and foregrounding the multiplicity of historical experience.

Parallel to this temporal play, the image of the human body is a central subject, being continually reframed and re-invented, moving from an academic depiction of the body to an interpretation of the body as social and political, which ultimately becomes defined through the dehumanising gaze of war technology.

Khomenko depicts the body, critically mimicking and referencing Soviet realism in series of works such as Wonderland (2010) and Giants (2007) while also creating works that are fundamentally anti-monumental gestures such as Friends (2005) and Drawing on Maidan series (2013-2014). From there, Khomenko moves towards the dis-integration of the human body itself. Covert Surveillance shows the human figure as a target, depicting what is under the skin in search of vulnerabilities. In the same room, Radical Approximation transforms into abstraction, aligning with snipers perspective or firearm optics. This comes to а culmination in the series Perspektyvna (2018) and Unidentified Figures (2022–ongoing), that together create a room-filling installation, interrogating the visibility of the human body under conditions of war. In Perspektyvna series (2018), soldiers are half-concealed behind branches, echoing the artist’s own vantage point from her studio. While in Unidentified Figures (2022–ongoing), depict military images blurred for reasons of security are transposed into painterly form. At this point, we moved from the human figure as a undividable sculpture, ironically referencing a historical heroism, to the body that is hidden and abstracted. Finally, it becomes divisible and targetable, then reduced to a single dot, seen by military technologies in the work I’m a Bullet (2024).

The exhibition unfolds as a journey through time and space, but also as a sustained exploration of Lesia Khomenko’s obsession to expand painting beyond the two-dimensions of the canvas. This third trajectory finds its most powerful articulation in Battle in the Trench, where painting is transformed into an immersive environment. Here, the subject of representation shifts decisively from the painted figure to the visitor, who becomes an unwitting performer. By walking through a constructed “trench,” whose claustrophobic architecture is modelled on footage from drones and soldiers’ body cameras, the viewer is physically implicated in the logic of war. At the same time, those observing from the gallery’s upper floor occupy a drone-like vantage point, gazing down upon the moving bodies below. The visitor becomes the painted subject, folded into a choreography of surveillance and exposure.

Khomenko is driven by her inner urgency of challenging the medium of painting itself as well as the urgency of her subject matter, the lived realities of war, protest and friendship throughout the last 25 years in Ukraine. What began as an engagement with Ukraine’s collective history culminates in a rethinking of what painting can be. Khomenko is not confined by surface or mere representation. Her work transcends the given canvas, becoming a performance of lived experiences. Her work is both testimony and experiment, it is painting as well as sculpture. It speaks to the fragility of the human body while empowering a collective agency through her critical reflection of Ukraine as a space, a country and a society.

Curator: Björn Geldhof