Home Artcollection » Artists » Liza Libenko
Liza Libenko (Krywyj Rih/UA, 1996) comes from the Ukrainian industrial town of Krywyj Rih, whose landscape she describes as rather dreary, which is why she decided to study painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and to broaden her horizons by shifting the center of her life. Her motifs are reminiscences of memories, some of them real, which she gradually processes and subsequently transforms into works of art in her artistic practice. One of these concrete sources of memory is a journey through the fields in late autumn, where she saw dead sunflowers. This landscape burned itself into her memory. When the war broke out in Ukraine, the motif became present again for the artist and suddenly seemed more relevant than ever. There is a certain melancholy and decadence in her works, but they can also be understood as metaphors, like the sunflowers - a symbol of the sun, vitality and life. In Libenko's work, however, they are burnt, bent and lifeless, like an epitaph that illustrates Libenko's view of the contemporary world through her own prism. Liza Libenko received a recognition prize of the STRABAG Artaward International in 2023.
