Nina Murashkina

Nina Murashkina works in painting, drawing, ceramics and performance. She calls her position "magical feminism": "I interpret reality according to my perception and recreate it in my works," she explains. Her compositions almost always place a woman at the centre — "a powerful force, a triumphant deity who can ride animals, wise men, or even the whole world". She describes her own work as "the delicious details of the unconscious and the extreme limits allowed in social relations".

Her visual vocabulary borrows from Ukrainian naive art, Indian and Japanese imagery and ancient mythologies; among her references she cites Maria Prymachenko, Louise Bourgeois and Niki de Saint Phalle. A system of symbols recurs from one piece to the next: eyes in place of nipples, for hypersensitivity and intuitive knowledge; books open on laps, where knowledge meets desire; beds, places of sleep, love, birth and death; snakes, for "elastic subtlety, silence and fascinating sexuality".

"For me, the essence of creation lies in storytelling, in making narratives where all the characters are connected and live their lives within the story. I forge my own myth, a world teeming with Eros and Thanatos," she writes.

The vases held by the gallery extend this story into clay: ceramics with underglaze decoration heightened with gold, fired three times at high temperature (1270 °C). Each piece carries a story — Hamlet as a fragile, distant young man, a woman at rest surrounded by hurried men, a novice driver facing everyday machismo.

Nina Murashkina was born on 3 January 1985 in Donetsk, in the industrial east of what was then Soviet Ukraine. She first trained at the Donetsk Art College, where she studied graphic design from 2000 to 2005, then at the Kharkiv Academy of Art and Design, in monumental painting, from 2005 to 2009. In 2011 she took a course in scenography and film at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. The following year, a grant from the Polish Gaude Polonia programme allowed her to study painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

Her career opened in the Ukrainian art scene of the 2010s. She exhibited in Kyiv at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and the Mironova gallery, and took part in several editions of the Biruchiy symposium. In 2018 the Ermilov Centre for Contemporary Art in Kharkiv gave her a solo exhibition, and the Korsak Museum of Modern Ukrainian Art in Lutsk has shown her work since 2019.

In 2017 she settled in Spain, in Sant Cugat Sesgarrigues, in the province of Barcelona, where she works alongside the sculptor Xavier Escala, with whom she has since carried out many joint projects. Her activity now spans Ukraine, Spain and the United States: the John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago hosted her in residence and gave her a solo exhibition in 2025, while Rukh Art Hub presents her in New York and Basel. She received the A-FAD prize from the Museu del Disseny in Barcelona in 2023, then the Grand Prize of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize in 2025.