
In Conversation with Lesia Khomenko
Lesia Khomenko is a painter born and raised in Ukraine, and a recent transplant to New York City. After leaving Ukraine with her 12-year-old daughter her journey included stops in Vienna, and residencies in New Jersey at Martha MoCA, and in Dania Beach, Florida before she finally settled here. Khomenko had two solo shows in New York in 2023 at the Ukrainian Museum and the Fridman Gallery, and is represented by Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv and Miami.
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International Arrivals: Welcome, Lesia. Your exhibition, Image and Presence, at the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village was your second solo show in North America and featured paintings as objects and installations with imagery that bears witness to mediated warfare. Can you tell us more about this exhibition?
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Lesia Khomenko: The museum was established by the Ukrainian diaspora in New York, and they have a very interesting collection based on Ukrainian folk and avant-garde work. This kind of collection does not exist in Ukraine–we have more period-based collections. I always build my work in dialogue with the institution and its context. So, this museum and its context was very important for me because I was feeling like I was not so sure about my identity–am I an immigrant or am I just an evacuee after fleeing Ukraine? So, to be in dialogue with an older generation of immigrants, Ukrainian immigrants, and this generation of the diaspora was so important for me.
My practice focuses on developing and building a new visual language, one that has led me towards abstraction. The Ukrainian Museum offered me a strong context for abstract painting and abstract art. My visual language can be seen as something like a theory of figuration based on new military optics as I am focusing on digital images and on footage that I get from the internet, and from the frontlines. I'm analyzing how our ideas about the body, war, and history have changed through this war, particularly because it’s the biggest modern war where Russia widely uses this intelligence network, drones, and artificial intelligence–very sophisticated inventions that are all being widely tested in this war and of course, there’s the internet and digital images.

Lesia Khomenko, Untitled Figures, 2022
In the beginning it was very clear that this war was full of images of death. We saw so many deaths on the internet. It was uncensored. Now I think it's less prevalent, but in those first few months it was shocking; it was like a pornography of war. So as an artist, I was interested in how this will change society, how it will change artists, and change art. For me, I had to let go of the frame, because I was on the move, and luckily, because I work in acrylic paint, I can roll my canvases and take them with me. I have become interested in the tubes in which I carry my work and want to incorporate them into my work. I mean, keeping the paintings in the tube [hidden] would be a radical deconstruction of the image.
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IA: There are images of your work that are more object-oriented: for example, deckchairs where you draped paintings over them. So rather than being in the space of the chair, you had paintings of figures as if they were in the deck chair, but outside the deck chair too–the paintings become kind of architectural.
LK: For many years, maybe about ten years now I've worked with the idea of painting as an object, as an installation. I wanted to make my paintings in relation to the the space and so I tried different configurations. In Ukraine, I also studied scenography.
IA: And what were the paintings at the Ukrainian Museum?
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LK: Each work represented a different approach of getting to abstraction. They were based on different military objects based on footage from drones, from snipers–visual footage from the frontline. And every original image was already an abstraction, so by moving this to painting, the abstraction becomes more obvious. For example, I depicted a view of Russian soldiers [whose image was captured] by a Ukrainian sniper in Bakhmut. I was so interested in the nature of a man who was a shooter, a sniper–someone who can take out a body from a huge distance–and because of this distance they have to objectify the others’ bodies. I thought there are so many similarities with how an artist thinks about bodies, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the shape of this, the visual language for this. But what I think is that artists only want to look at the surface of the body, the shape, the shadows, while a shooter wants to penetrate the surface–to get into the body, and that is full of fantasy for me, the imagined, and the imaginary. When this full-scale war started, we had access to so much footage, especially real-time shooting. We are seeing this war unfold in real time–witnessing– of course, because everyone has telephones, and soldiers have cameras, and I think in some ways, it destroys the imagination and leads us to something else. I think the mission of art is to deal with this. And so, I was using this footage of shooting someone who is only a white dot; I mean, on the video the person is only a small white dot, and then I played with scale so the white dot, the real body, is the same size as our bodies, bringing a human dimension in this abstraction.
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When my exhibition was held at the Ukrainian Museum, there was another exhibition of the works of Janet Sobel, a Ukrainian who immigrated to New York at the beginning of 20th century before the October Revolution, and she became part of the New York School of abstract expressionism, but was, of course, in the shadow of the boys. Some claim that she was the first person to do drip paintings. For me it was very interesting that this other exhibition had small paper works from the Second World War–another female view on the war from a distance.
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Lesia Khomenko, AJS (After Janet Sobel), 2023, installation View from Ukrainian Museum
IA: And through abstraction?
LK: More like simplified figuration. Some of them are quite abstract, but it's still figurative works, but it's so far from social realism.
IA:In other Eastern European countries, like Serbia for example, abstraction was seen as extreme, compared to state-approved social realism, that many people who painted in that way were brought in, and exhibitions were closed down. Was it the same in Ukraine? Does abstraction have the same kind of history?
LK: In Ukraine we have a whole generation of artists, writers and other intellectuals who were executed in 1937 by Stalin. It was our vanguard generation. After the 1930s we didn't have abstract art at all. We had non-conformist movements of artists in the 60s but they were also repressed. That’s why I was so interested when I started with my experiments with simplified figuration based on abstract possibilities. I was curious, is it possible to make an abstract image after this Soviet period without just repeating a Western tradition? I needed to look for tools, approaches, and methodologies to help me get to abstraction. This led me to the idea that abstraction can also deconstruct Soviet propaganda and mythology. These experiments in abstraction were about ten years ago and so recently, I made the leap from figuration back to abstraction.
IA: The way that you move between abstraction and figuration in your work–specifically your use of military figures where you have faces that are glitched out, or an image of a gun layered over more guns–is intriguing. By transforming a photograph into painterly abstraction the viewer experience also changes; the surveillance and information aspects of photography are then highlighted. Can you elaborate on this?
LK: I was really focused on the nature of the images that I was using and divided them into ethically-taken images and not ethically-taken images; if I'm spying on someone or using surveillance footage, or if I’m asking someone to give me an image. When the full-scale war started, I decided that I should move from Ukraine because of my daughter. I didn’t want her to experience this and it was dangerous to stay. This distance, and how we experience the war from a distance, become very important to me. My husband stayed in Ukraine to fight, so I began looking more closely at images of soldiers and I found that soldiers were obscuring their faces through glitching, or pixelization, or various other forms offered by the phone. Because I was working with footage of Soviet paintings after the Second World War, I became interested in this idea of the unknown soldier, the unknown hero, and their mythologization, because we have a lot of unknown heroes, but for completely different reasons. Now, everyone could be visible through social media. We have lots of TikTok videos–sometimes even very funny TikTok videos recorded by soldiers in the frontline, dancing and feeding animals –but strategically they obscure their faces and backgrounds. It's important because of the information that they might be giving away, since the opposite side can be looking at this footage. Ukrainians also dig into the Russian internet. So photography has been turned into a dangerous weapon and I think it's a huge turn in photography. We need to be visible and invisible at the same time. It offers more questions than answers, but I'm trying to find answers, so I'm depicting the soldiers with various forms of obscuration; sometimes I have soldiers from different images in one painting.
IA: In one image you have soldiers with black pixelated squares instead of faces, and it reminded me of superheroes, every superhero has their own superpower and costume, but it also reminded me of computer avatars. This war has a lot of parallels with computer games.
LK: Exactly. That parallel has been building for a long time where you have these game scenarios that mimic actual wars. I think that there's a really interesting overlay between video games and the reality of what we're seeing, like bodies being shot at or missiles being shot. My new works will probably look at real-time recordings from the trenches, from the frontline, because I think it’s incredible–this digital reality.
IA: The relationship between surveillance, war, and death has been present for a long time. The history of photography starts with photographs of the front during the Civil War with photographs of dead bodies. And if you think about how photography was used to disseminate information during World War one and two, where people were actually able to see what was happening–this was new. The war in Vietnam was the first war people saw on television–in their living rooms, and the war with Iraq was the first war that we were able to watch ‘live’.
LK: Iraq was 20 years ago and there's a huge difference. I was thinking a lot about that because it was represented mostly by television reporters and professional photographers. Now we are watching the Ukrainian war mostly through big media outlets and user-generated content. In the past we saw war only through a professional photographer’s gaze, we only saw their best photographs. Now we have tons of footage. And the mission of artists has changed; I am doing tons of research, for example, spending hours and hours every day searching on the internet. I'm collecting images. I'm not using all of them, but I'm accumulating and I'm thinking about them. But despite these artistic efforts, I would say that the image of war has changed because of this access and because everyone can record. We are working with real and unexpected things, working with life and death from new angles. Furthermore, because we are not getting our images from the television, or from professional photographers, we see different things; humor for example. I see a lot of humor that happens, very close, or next to, death. They are laughing at themselves; they endure and they laugh.
IA: It’s so interesting you say that, because in our podcast with Ukrainian artist Katya Grokhovsky, she mentioned the same thing. She talked about the soldiers, making videos of themselves dancing, or playing with cats; and that humor is so important to what is happening, as a way to hold onto your humanity.
LK: Yes. And humor is very difficult to translate.
IA: Absolutely. We've all tried to translate those jokes that just never work.
LK: Ukrainian humor is similar to British humor; it becomes a way of resisting the reality of what is happening–to joke about it. And people joke more when it gets harder, the jokes become funnier, and soldiers are joking all the time. All the time about everything.
IA: There’s an adage, “you can either cry about it or you can laugh about it.” Those are your choices, not just not just about war, but about life in general. I think it's a necessary part of being.
LK: I agree. I would love for my work to have more humor, because personally I have an acerbic sense of humor. I love to joke, but I can't do it.
IA: It's hard to find the opening. Or maybe it's too soon?
Can you tell us about your series that was at the Venice Biennale in 2022 entitled Max in the Army.
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LK: Max in the Army, was my first work after the full-scale war had started. We escaped Kyiv the next day–on February 25th–my family and my partner, Max. We went to Transcarpathian which is very close to the Romanian-Hungarian border. Max is a new media and sound artist and there was a community of hackers in the village who were hacking and attacking the Russian side. He wanted to be useful so he registered with the local authorities and immediately got called into the army because he was studying as an engineer for aircraft in the military department in university so at least he knew how the army functioned a little bit. They took him immediately without even a medical exam. He's been in the army since then: he’s not on the frontline. He's not a shooter. He's a coordinator. He's an officer. I was so curious about him in the army because he was a bass guitar player experimenting with a generative sound – not your usual army fare. And I was so curious, asking him, for example, if he had to salute the other officers, and asking him to send me photos. But he was not allowed to take photos in the army unit, so he would go outside at night, and take a few photos and a few images for me saluting. He was in a normal outfit; it's the same outfit that he took from Kiev, so he is the same, except for the saluting gesture. I found that it was so representative of what Ukraine was; because the beginning of the war was so chaotic and messy and it was so huge a lot of people joined the army but they didn't have uniforms. Ukraine was not prepared for this kind of war. So, a lot of soldiers were in their regular outfits with weapons. And for me, it was an image of how society merges with the army; how society resists; how society protects its own values. I wanted to generate some images that could be understandable outside of Ukraine because war is impossible to explain.
When you hear that first explosion, it changes your whole body. It changed everything. Then when I saw my husband's image it struck me as something so common, so universal. So, I did my first painting. I created it in Ivano-Frankivsk, which is a small city where I started an emergency residency for artists like me who had just escaped east Ukraine. I had two storage spaces in Kiev because I had been working with large-scale paintings for more than 15 years; this first month I was sure that I would never see my works again.

Lesia Khomenko, Max In The Army, 2022
Installation view from This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom : A Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
One of the reasons that I needed to keep working was to prove to myself that I was still an artist, even though everything was destroyed. I needed to produce; since my archive was possibly destroyed and there would be no evidence that I had done something. Therefore, this residency became important, not just to produce works, but to work in a common space, to discuss. There were only a few institutions that were able to keep going, because all of the institutions were closed or helping people. So, for me, it was very important to make this connection between artists and art institutions visible because everything was being destroyed in Ukraine, but culture is still here are not just a territory; we are a society.
There was a private art centre in Kyiv, the PinchukArtCentre, they usually do art prize shortlist shows, but because of the war, this changed. They have a brilliant Belgium curator Bjorn Geldhof, who had been at Pinchukartcentre for over ten years. He asked if I would like to continue with this work of Max in the Army, but adjusted to a huge space in the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice. So, I moved to Warsaw to an arts residency in Ujazdowskiy Castle, and painted. These paintings were 4 meters high–giant paintings. It was my first time painting on the floor. It's quite specific because you lose perspective. I never use a pencil or something to make drawings before painting. I'm always painting directly on the canvas, so working on these huge figures it was very difficult to keep everything in proportion. However, they turned out really well and looked great in the space in Venice.
LK: I asked Max to take photos of the other guys. In their unit when there were air raids, the soldiers had to go into the forest, because they didn’t have shelters. So, when they were walking around, it was safe to take photos. The backgrounds were often blurred so it was not possible to recognize the location. I decided to make realistic works, to capture the everyday details of their outfits and the guns with them. They needed to be visible.
IA: It also provides a contrast to your other images, where the faces are blurred, these are particular individuals, specific human beings.
LK: Yes. One of the last works is also about soldiers, but about particular soldiers who lost their limbs–those who speak about it openly, who are really fighting for their lives, fighting for normality. A lot of them returned to the army. It's crazy. I'm taking images from Instagram and painting them and then rolling them into a tube, adding a sneaker, or adding a boxing glove–suggesting the limbs. And for me it’s also about the shape of the tube, it's about my own history because I'm traveling with tubes and I am always afraid that my own works will go missing or be destroyed somewhere in Ukraine.
IA: It ties back to this idea of surface that you were talking about: where a body is a surface. You talked about the sniper’s bullet penetrating that surface. With the addition of the tubes, it kind of keeps the story, or the narrative, inside the tube so that it's never fully known. With this, there's something about the container that is linked to the body.
Russia invading Ukraine has become a sort of a fight for freedom in so many ways. It's read that way by so many countries around the world, particularly in the US, where during the Cold War, Russia was the big enemy. It feels like we're returning to that in a weird way. Do you see this the same way, especially being in the United States now? Do you think that we have somehow mythologized this war, this enemy?
LK: Of course. In the US it's a huge machine of myth-making–Hollywood movies particularly. I would say that we are lucky that this huge machine now supports Ukraine, because Russians dehumanize Ukraine and Ukrainians. Russian propaganda claims that Ukrainians are fascist and should be destroyed immediately, even kids. It's really, really, violent. I don't want to glorify American propaganda, of course, because it's very complex. But I mean, now it's helpful, at least practically.
I would like to mention another of my works that is really in dialogue with the US. It's also tubes. I am depicting weapons on the canvases that I am later rolling, and they become almost abstracted versions of the Javelin, which is an anti-tank missile, given by the US to Ukraine. This weapon is very successful on the front line; it can take down helicopters, even planes. It’s a simple kind of weaponry, but controversial in the US for many reasons including mass shootings here and the war in Iraq… But, it's just a weapon–I want to make a division between war crimes and weapons–but if Ukraine had enough weapons, we would now be safe.
My works in these tubes are about weapons. It's not good or bad. It's just a fact. All Ukrainians donate money for weapons and for drones; big foundations collect money for tanks. But in the US people also donate for weapons through taxes and the US helps Ukraine. Everyone donates money for weapons and it’s a paradox. I wanted to explore this in my work, without a conclusion–positive or negative.
Ukraine is more deeply post-human because the idea of humanity, the idea of body, the limitation of the body has changed, especially with these missing limbs and prosthetics. We have tens of thousands of people without limbs; many kids, many civilians, because after every shelling we have reports about the death toll, but that doesn’t include the injured.
In a few years on the streets of Kyiv we will see a lot of kids with prosthetics, a lot of young women, young men, older people–all with prosthetics. So, I think that one of the missions of artists is to think about how this will affect the world. Thinking beyond the ordinary body, a cyber-body. I've been joking that it will be like a cyber-punk society.
LK: Here in New York, I met with Ukrainian soldiers who have prosthetics, and for my show at Fridman gallery I talked to them about how an artist might work with this idea of missing limbs and different bodies.
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Lesia Khomenko, A Moment of Silence, 2023
IA: Do you imagine you’ll be working more directly with soldiers in the future?
LK: Yes. I'm planning to work with soldiers. Before the full-scale invasion, I was very deeply involved in education, developing alternative art education in Ukraine. It was a full time program, like a BFA. I would like to do that here, but to work with veterans. Art would be therapeutic, but also I would like to collaborate with soldiers. I think it would be a challenge to rethink and articulate changing ideas about the body.
Transcribed and edited from an interview with Lesia Khomenko 11/2/23. Images courtesy of the artist. On previous page pictured with the artist: Radical Approximation, 2023
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