Mykyta Shklyaruk
‘Path’, 2025, oil on canvas, 50 х 40 cm
‘Date’, 2025, oil on canvas, 82 х 60 cm
‘Sao Miguel’, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 х 40 cm
‘Bathers / Red Bathhouse’, 2025, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm
‘Coin Bank’, 2025, oil on canvas, 90 x 65 cm
Mykyta works with painting, drawing, performance, film format and conceptual projects. They identify as a queer artist. In their practice, Mykyta explores gay folklore, intimate imagination and images of everyday life, seeking to capture what they call ‘local queer archetypes’. The artist gravitates towards a documentary, combining the personal with the political—Mykyta focuses on painting as a way of recording everyday experience.
Their work centres on the microworlds of the queer community, intertwined with their own, which they explore, document and present from the perspective of a community member. The image of the totemic animal, ‘Coin Bank’, symbolises a ‘different world’ with which Mykyta identifies. The tiger depicted on the canvas is an element of a still life featuring a coin bank—a personal object important to the artist. The work functions as a connecting link, pointing to the documentary nature of the cycle shown at the exhibition. At the same time, the image of the tiger evokes the existence of a ‘different’ reality—‘wild’ queer spaces that are unsettling and generate a sense of inner tension. The key feature of these spaces is the possibility of coexistence, touch and tenderness but also the tension that arises in the space between trust and risk. Employing expressionist—chromatic and artistic—techniques, Mykyta constructs these spaces as liminal, on the threshold of states or worlds. ‘Bath Attendants / Red Bathhouse’ appears as a space where turbulent sensuality displaces the soul. The couple crossing the bridge in ‘Date’ is captured in dynamic movement from one place to another. ‘Path’ is a documentary film about a queer party in Kyiv that took place after the full-scale invasion, revealing a condition in which extreme tension of uncertainty and threat transforms into a need for and expression of sensual intimacy. São Miguel Pub is a venue frequented mainly by foreigners. It creates an atmosphere of an ‘external’ world: ‘This is where time and space appear to reflect on those you have lost and will never see again or those you will meet but never see again’.
