On the Road I
Yulia Rotkina is a visual artist who has worked across multiple disciplines, yet recently returned to oil painting as a refuge in tumultuous times. Her work is concerned with memory—personal, collective, and inherited—and how it shapes our understanding of self, history, and displacement. The focus of her artistic research lies in the fleeting nature of time and being, where the tension between permanence and impermanence becomes central. Through her nuanced approach, Yulia captures the ephemeral and the enduring, creating works that resonate with a quiet, introspective depth. She embraces the slowness and intimacy of the oil painting, allowing her figures and objects to emerge from layers of paint with a sense of quiet urgency.
On the Road II
The paintings in Yulia’s On the Road series capture fleeting figures—faceless yet familiar—moving through vast, undefined landscapes. They are neither fully present nor entirely absent, blending into muted tones of earth and sky. The composition offers no clear destination—only an ongoing passage through space.
Here, movement is not a choice but an inevitability. Who are these people met on the road? Are they travellers, refugees, or simply humans caught in transit? Their identities remain ambiguous, emphasizing the universality of untold stories and the secrets they bear. Yulia’s brushwork is restrained yet expressive, allowing emotion to seep through subdued palettes and softened edges. These paintings are not about singular stories but about the collective experience of those who walk roads unknown to us, their burdens carried beyond the limits of our searching gaze.
The series All I Own lingers in stillness. Placed within the tradition of still-life painting, it examines simple objects—a wallet, a set of keys, a pair of headphones. These are the remnants of home transported across distances, ordinary belongings that take on extraordinary significance in the context of migration.
All I Own I
The hard drives in All I Own I speak of longing, adaptation, and the human instinct to preserve fragments of a lost world. The artist presents them in an intimate subtle palette, reinforcing the quiet resilience of these seemingly mundane possessions. What is left behind, and what is carried forward? The series urges the viewer to reconsider the emotional gravity of objects—how they ground us, how they store our histories, how they whisper of belonging even in unfamiliar places.
Yulia Rotkina’s work does not offer conclusions. Instead, it opens a dialogue about travelling and memory, allowing viewers to explore their own narratives. Through restrained compositions and layered brushwork, she invites us to look closer—not only at the figures and objects depicted but at our own relationship with movement, loss, and what it means to belong.
