Art

Paint to wax: Monika Ancheva on going from passion project to boutique

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 12/10/2026 6:30 PM

Monika Ancheva is a Bulgarian-born artist, graphic designer and founder of Ancheva Designs – a boutique creating bespoke, hand-painted candles for every occasion. Alongside candle-making, she runs painting classes and creative workshops across London, sharing the joy of hands-on creativity with others. Over the past five years, she’s turned a late-night passion project into a […] Read More

Art Made to Fade: botanical sculptor Julia Borysenko on the ancient Japanese art of ikebana

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 11/10/2026 7:13 PM

Artists I am always excited to learn more about are those who make temporary, transient, ephemeral things. People who create art knowing it will disappear within weeks, perhaps days. Artists who deliberately choose organic materials with a death sentence built in. Artists who understand, at the very moment of making, that the work is already […] Read More

When International Law Meets the Canvas: A Conversation with Elvira Pushkareva

BY Ella Natalia Hopkins POSTED 21/09/2026 3:00 PM

In September, London welcomed Painting International Law: Art for Conceptual Visualisation, an exhibition by Prof. Dr. Elvira Pushkareva at Candid Arts Trust, presented in collaboration with HIAS, the University of Hamburg, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship and The Bold Mellon Collective. Elvira Pushkareva is an international law scholar and artist with more than 20 […] Read More

Plants the Size of a Room: Janet Pulcho’s Watercolours

BY Natalia Andreeva POSTED 15/09/2026 5:36 AM

Janet Pulcho works with flowers, but there is very little that feels decorative about her paintings. Born in Ukraine and now based in Florence, she has spent the past several years making watercolors on a scale more commonly associated with oil or acrylic. Her peonies and poppies often stretch well past one and a half […] Read More

Shadows Before Sunrise: Nataliia Maiboroda and the Veps

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 27/07/2026 12:15 PM

A woman stands knee-deep in snow. Red headscarf, dark coat, hands folded in front of her. She’s looking somewhere beyond the frame, past the frost-covered forest, past the grey winter sky. The image is from Nataliia Maiboroda’s *Shadows Before Sunrise*, shot in December 2021 in the villages of the Veps, one of the region’s smallest […] Read More

Stillness Before Meaning – on how we are sometimes slowed for a reason

BY Izba Arts POSTED 17/07/2026 12:53 PM

Anna Air is a London-based photographer and artist whose practice spans fashion, reportage, and fine art self-portraiture. She trained at leading institutions in London and Moscow and is a laureate of multiple international photography contests. Her work has taken her behind the scenes with artists from the UK, Cyprus, and Greece – an unfiltered, reportage-style […] Read More

TuRist: Travel, Symbol, and the Aesthetics of Disquiet

BY Izba Arts POSTED 11/06/2026 11:32 AM

TuRist’s practice is rooted in movement, observation, and a desire to turn lived experience into visual form. Across painting and sculptural work, the artist builds a language shaped by travel, memory, and a strong sense of personal authorship. What emerges is a practice that is direct, image-led, and deliberately unafraid of conviction. At the centre […] Read More

BLIN GAZETA: DISPLACEMENT, DUALITY, AND THE IN-BETWEEN

BY Margarita Makhanova POSTED 10/06/2026 4:02 PM

Keeping an eye out for new magazines, the IZBA Arts team came across Blin Gazeta, which features works of Slavic and Post-Soviet artists. ‘Gazeta’, translated from Russian, means ‘newspaper’, while ‘blin’ is a bit more interesting, meaning both ‘crêpe’ and ‘crap’ (or to be more precise, “Pancake/crepe/blini and minced oath, colloquial, Damnit! or Darn!”). Last […] Read More

Imagination of Time: Mikheil Gogava at the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art

BY Izba Arts POSTED 09/06/2026 11:45 AM

At the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Mikheil Gogava’s solo exhibition Imagination of Time (20 April–2 June) asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to remember, when memory itself refuses to stay still? Gogava, a Georgian artist with more than twenty years of practice, has long worked at the intersection […] Read More

Privileged Enough to Enter, Not Quite Enough to Belong

BY Elena Demireva POSTED 08/06/2026 4:09 PM

It’s getting harder to be an immigrant, a woman, and a creative. The very characteristics that determine my identity – being an immigrant, a woman, and a professional in the creative industry – are also the traits that make me most vulnerable in 2026 as I navigate life in London’s changing political landscape. I moved […] Read More

Wandering Through Concrete and Light: The Transient Geometries of Natasha Navasardian

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 24/05/2026 11:45 AM

An exploration of the photographer’s practice as she navigates work, life, and quiet moments across the cities along her journey, from the linear blocks of New York to the galleries of London and Seoul. Modern cities are built for speed. In the constant rush of daily life, our eyes tend to glide over surfaces without […] Read More

Danaia Konstantinova and the Contemporary Politics of Memory

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 20/04/2026 10:05 AM

At a moment when contemporary image culture is increasingly defined by speed, excess, and disposability, Danaia Konstantinova’s practice offers a deliberate counter-position. Working primarily through analogue and craft-based photographic processes, the London-based artist uses material experimentation not as nostalgic gesture, but as a precise contemporary language for examining memory, migration, and the unstable construction of […] Read More

Drop-In: spring equinox and Eastern European art

BY Izba Arts POSTED 20/03/2026 5:23 PM

From March 20th to the 22th, Izba Arts present a brand new festival and exhibition of works at Drop-In from across the former Eastern Bloc focused around belonging, myth and renewal. Weaving together stories old and new through a series of films, performances, paintings and interactive installations, the show brings together artists reclaiming and reimagining […] Read More

The Claustrophobia of the Inner Critic: Revolt at Battersea Arts Centre

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 18/03/2026 7:07 PM

There is a particular kind of silence that precedes self-destruction – not the silence of peace, but of a clock winding down. It was this silence that filled the Battersea Arts Centre on 11 March, as Revolt premiered as part of London’s Borough of Culture festival. At its core, Revolt stages the most intimate and […] Read More

Through Her Eyes: Three Women Artists Explore Childhood, Play, and Perception

BY Natalia Andreeva POSTED 17/03/2026 7:22 PM

Through Her Eyes, an exhibition presented by The Kult Talk at Friendly Grounds in London, brings together three contemporary artists: Anna Kiparis, Tatiana Fetisova, and Olga Bonitas – whose work transforms personal experience into distinct visual languages. Running from 3 March to 4 April 2026, the project explores themes such as motherhood, childhood, play, and […] Read More

Love Has Not Died. It Has Changed Its Language

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 13/03/2026 11:11 AM

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport…” There was a time when that line from Love Actually felt disarmingly tender. Today, it sounds almost provocative. The world has grown louder, more anxious, more brittle. We discuss crises, fractures and cultural fatigue with fluency. […] Read More

Battersea Arts Centre: on ritual and a home renewed – equinox, maslenitsa and the in-between

BY Izba Arts POSTED 07/03/2026 9:29 PM

From March 9th to the 13th, Battersea Arts Centre and Izba Arts present an exhibition of works from across the former Eastern Bloc focused around belonging, myth and renewal. Weaving together stories old and new through a series of films, performances, paintings and interactive installations, the show brings together artists reclaiming and reimagining Eastness and […] Read More

Development, Explosion and Decay. Maks Shevchenko and His Diagnosis of Decline

BY Оskar Сzapiewski POSTED 27/02/2026 7:12 AM

The exhibition Entropy by Maks Shevchenko was presented at Espacio Art Gallery, London, 13-15 December in 2025 From Coloured Dots to the Atomic Bomb The dot in the language of modernist art has a deep and rich tradition. Pointillism, a movement of the second half of the nineteenth century emerging from Impressionism, became a symbol […] Read More

On Gesture and Participation: Upside Down in Vienna

BY Izba Arts POSTED 26/01/2026 10:11 AM

After the moving success of Requiem — Toolip Art Gallery’s cycle-closing homage to Mozart in December 2025 — the Vienna-based gallery begins 2026 with a new group exhibition: Upside Down. Bringing together a range of international artists, Upside Down explores what happens when the familiar is disrupted — when perception shifts, and the world quite […] Read More

Life, Death, and Digital Dreams: Maya Yaroshenko at Milan’s Abstract in Motion

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 15/12/2025 1:58 PM

Milan has long been a city that negotiates the tension between old worlds and emerging artistic futures. This December, from 2 to 7 December, Art Gallery Finestreria hosts Abstract in Motion, a group exhibition uniting twelve artists investigating abstraction not as a style, but as a state of becoming. Among them, Maya Yaroshenko offers a […] Read More

A Dialogue with Malevich and the Black Hole

BY Elena Smorodinova POSTED 14/12/2025 1:15 PM

Until the end of December, Maxim Boxer Gallery presents Bipolarisation, an exhibition by Semen Khanin and Artur Virtmanis. This project by a small conceptual gallery founded by curator Maxim Bokser carries particular significance for Riga, not only because of its artistic ambition, but because of the intellectual and perceptual risks it is willing to take. […] Read More

Before and After the Gallery: After Art, Will, Save, Us

BY Izba Arts POSTED 11/12/2025 11:30 AM

Now closed, Art, Will, Save, Us leaves behind the trace of an exhibition that asked not what viewers saw, but what they carried away with them. Presented at Toolip Gallery in Vienna, the collective show brought together forty-four local and international artists and unfolded less as a conventional exhibition than as a proposition. Art here […] Read More

Curatorial recommendation: 5 reads that helped shape the understanding of what curation is.

BY Margarita Makhanova POSTED 22/11/2025 2:01 PM

In one of the episodes of a ‘Curating Tools’ podcast hosted by Call for Curators and Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, one of the guests said that you don’t necessarily need an academic background to be a curator. Your own background determines your curatorial specialisation. Having received a formal education in creative events management, I […] Read More

Traces of Touch: The Living Archive by Parks Sadler

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 18/11/2025 9:52 AM

In the former Eastern Bloc region, artists and researchers working with archives often explore silence as well as what’s present — what was hidden, censored, or deemed unworthy of remembrance? For London-based interdisciplinary artist Parks Sadler, who spent a formative period in Wrocław, Poland, the act of remembering becomes a radical gesture. Their practice — […] Read More

Where Summer Lingers: Anna Iarchuk’s Tender Diary

BY Ksenia Kazintseva POSTED 17/11/2025 10:25 AM

London-based collage artist and children’s illustrator Anna Iarchuk brings a burst of warmth into November with her new exhibition Echoes of Summer, which opened on 11 November at Friendly Grounds. Supported by The Kult Talk, the show invites viewers into an intimate world of texture, light, and quiet observation — a soft reminder of seasons […] Read More

Calendar

October 2026

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Eastern European Art Week Guide

Read our current Art Week guide here, also view previous issues

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