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 quietly arresting presence, one that neither shouts nor performs, but insists on being felt.
Yaroshenko’s practice sits at the threshold between instinct and construction. Born in Russia, raised across Israel, and now working in the United Kingdom, her identity is shaped by geopolitical drift, not as biography, but as texture. “I feel everything going on in this world almost physically long before I can express it. Images appear where words fail,” she notes. That sensibility, of sensing before knowing, forms the pulse of her contribution to the exhibition.
Maya Yaroshenko
At the centre of Yaroshenko’s Milan presentation is Life/Death, a mixed-media work that revolves around the image of a bull’s skull, or rather its afterimage. The form remains recognisable while slipping away. Horns press into a stark white field, while washes of brown and red flicker like memories that refuse to settle. The work avoids morbidity, instead negotiating permanence and disappearance. It reads as an anatomy of transition, a moment suspended between what is no longer and what has not yet arrived.
Within a show preoccupied with motion, both literal and metaphoric, Life/Death stands almost still. Not inert, but held. It feels less like a statement than an ache, asking the viewer to pause rather than decode.
Life/ Death, mixed media, 2024.
Two further works, Another Brick in the Wall and Piece of Heart, extend Yaroshenko’s ongoing inquiry into hybrid modes of making. Her use of digital tools is restrained and deliberate. Technology is not treated as spectacle but as a surface capable of holding emotional residue. Layers of ink, paint, and digital manipulation dissolve into one another until material boundaries become difficult to trace. What remains is not technique, but atmosphere.
Curator Ilona Marchik frames Abstract in Motion as a dialogue between artists at different stages of their careers, united by an interest in abstraction as process rather than outcome. Within this context, Yaroshenko’s work feels assured without being declarative. It resists resolution and instead invites sustained attention. Her paintings ask the viewer to sit with uncertainty rather than rush toward interpretation.
Piece of heart, mixed media, 2024.
The Milan exhibition follows Yaroshenko’s presentation at London’s Brick Lane Gallery in February 2024, where works such as Faded, The Trick of Perception, À la seconde, and Another Brick in the Wall first brought wider attention to her layered, emotionally driven compositions. Critics noted her ability to make digital surfaces feel haunted, as though memory itself had become pixelated. That concern continues in Life/Death, where the digital canvas functions as a site for charting ambiguity and emotional thresholds.
In a contemporary landscape increasingly defined by technological acceleration and disembodiment, Yaroshenko’s work operates in quiet resistance. She refuses the binary between digital fluency and emotional presence, instead allowing the two to coexist. Her abstraction is neither nostalgic nor futurist, but suspended somewhere in between, where human fragility encounters digital possibility.
Another brick in the wall, mixed media, 2024.
Abstract in Motion positions abstraction not as retreat, but as confrontation, with self, with history, and with the intangible. Yaroshenko’s contribution underscores this premise with clarity and restraint. Her works neither resolve nor soothe. They open a space where memory misbehaves, perception slips into feeling, and meaning remains provisional. In a moment when contemporary art often gravitates toward spectacle or certainty, Yaroshenko’s willingness to remain with ambiguity feels both timely and necessary.
