Natalia Lisova
‘Indifferent Space’, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm
‘Indifferent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm
‘Silent Space’, 2025, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm
Natalia is an artist, art critic and researcher of Ukrainian land art. She works with land art, performance, installation, and painting. Her practice explores the presence of the artist within performance and its boundaries, the psychology of the viewer’s perception and the ways in which artistic practice shapes the dimensions of time and space. Observation, interaction, supplementation and preservation of the environment are the methods she employs. In one way or another, all of Natalia’s works relate to the landscape.
Since the full-scale invasion, another strand has emerged in Lisova’s practice—black-and-white oil painting. It grew out of quick pastel sketches intended to capture the state evoked by the experienced reality. With the outbreak of war, the diary format—as a way of recording and bearing witness—became a form of expression for many Ukrainian artists. Natalia’s monochrome painting has its roots in this practice but develops into an autonomous work that conveys a story, or rather a state, conveyed through the image in which the actually seen can be conjectured. At the beginning of the war, Natalia began sketching people sheltering from danger in shelters. Out of respect for their situation and to prevent the recognition of specific individuals, she worked with pastels that could be blended, offering only a general image and helping to capture emotions and atmosphere. Later, other motifs emerged—places you fear to lose, places to which you may never return. Recording these fragments of space—familiar spaces one wishes to preserve—enabled the artist to register her own emotional response to what she saw and, with time, to revisit it through the captured image. From the fabric of reality, Natalia isolates fragments that recall the past—it is vital as it shapes the future. To create the image of the future, a foundation is required, that is, the artist’s emotions. The black-and-white palette of the monochrome paintings gathers and concentrates these emotions, focusing them on a single point—on a memory to which the imagination binds.
