KATERYNA KOBYLIANSKA
The bacteria in your gut shape your cravings. Culture does the same to your thinking. I paint that overlap.
Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Montréal. 30 exhibitions internationally: Ukraine, Canada, Spain, and Tanzania.
Paintings placed in
Selected artworks
Enjoyment as Obligation
The Externalized Desire
The Endless Beginning
Artist Statement
I'm researching a phenomenon that keeps surprising me: biology and culture are running the same program.
Your microbiome gets colonized by bacteria that rewire the system from inside. What you eat shapes what you'll crave next. By then, the choice already feels like yours. That's the unsettling part: not that someone controls you, but that each choice already scripts the next, and you experience the whole thing as freedom.
Culture works the same way. You're exposed to a sign: a sound, an image, a symbol, and it starts shaping what you'll want next. Pop music trains the ear to crave a certain resolution. Language gives you words for some feelings and not others, and what has no word slowly stops existing. Advertising trains desire before you have a name for what you want. A flag trains belonging. And slowly the sign replaces the thing it once pointed to, you end up desiring the copy, forgetting there was ever an original. Politics. The market. Religion. Same mechanism, different bacteria.
I paint that invisible moment. Abstract because what I'm painting has no face, it works precisely because it's faceless. Through layered glazes, embedded figures and diagrams imposed over organic surfaces, I build environments being written over. A single element sometimes sharpens into focus against the blur: a texture, a diagram edge, a fragment. That's where the question lives: what did you actually choose?
Silence is where I work. The condition where you can finally hear the difference between your own impulse and something else wearing your voice.
My thinking is rooted in cultural studies.
CV
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2023 "The Drama of Elusive", Art Gallery at the Eleanor London Côte Saint-Luc Public Library, Montreal, Canada
2023 "Ambiguity", Centaur Theatre Gallery, Montreal, Canada
2021 "Intangible", Soul, Kyiv, Ukraine
2021 "Repeated chaos becomes order", Svitlo, Kyiv, Ukraine
2021 "Alexithymia", Creative State of Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine
2020 "Air never learned how to be", Soul, Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 "The treachery of there and then", CMW, Barcelona, Spain
2019 "The treachery of there and then", MAUI, Barcelona, Spain
2018 "Not water or...?", Dim MK, Kyiv, Ukraine (slow show of the artworks accompanied by Canadian composer Léon Colibri)
2018 "Caressing still motion", IWonder, Kyiv, Ukraine
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2026 “Becoming”, WIP Gallery, Montreal, Canada
2026 “L’art de donner”, Association Pulmonaire Québec, Montreal, Canada
2026 “Moi m’aime: 100 Self-Portraits”, LIVART Art Center, Montreal, Canada
2025 “Summer Art Expo”, Peter W. Hart Gallery, Montreal, Canada
2025 “Moi m’aime: 100 Self-Portraits”, Auction, LIVART Art Center, Montreal, Canada
2024 “Summer Daydreams”, BOA Gallery, Montreal, Canada
2023 "Otherness", Office of the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Montreal, Canada
2022 "In my childhood", Artists in Montreal, online
2022 "We are More", Art festival, Refugee Center, Montreal, Canada
2020 "One day after/Universe", Museum of Kyiv History, Kyiv, Ukraine
2020 "One day after/Nature", Museum of Kyiv History, Kyiv, Ukraine
2020 "Two dots", NV Gallery online in kunstmatrix.com
2019 "Untitled folder", AIR GOGOLFEST, Vinnytzja, Ukraine
2019 "Waves of reality", ІModern Art Research Institute, Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 "Semiramida's Garden", Gallery of the National Botanical Garden, Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 "Measure of Silence", Fine Art Museum of Ternopil, Ternopil, Ukraine
2019 "The Shadow of Dream cast upon Giardini della Biennale" - Pavilion of Ukraine at the 58th International ArtExhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, as a Myth of an artist
2018 "Explore Art", Le Meridien, Dahab, Egypt
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2020 Art expedition to Tanzania, Project "The dreams of a lonely house"
2019 German-Ukrainian program by NVAIR Artist in residence, Ukraine
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2022 “In my childhood”, Artists in Montreal | Honourable mention
2021 Poznan Artweek, Illustration competition “The Covid nostalgia” | Chosen artwork
2021 The Aerogramme Centre | Featured artist for the Cover | Issue “Mythology”
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2008-2012 National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”, Bachelor in Cultural studies
2021 Anatomy for the artist, Projector, Kyiv
2020 Creative Business Academy, House of Europe, online
2018 Abstract art course by Andriy Bludov, Kyivription
Press
“Artist's path” | Aeroplan magazine 20-21p.
Kateryna Kobylianska | Art research platform MOKONSHU
“A Day in the Life” with Montreal Abstract Artist
Kateryna Kobylianska | Montreal Guardian
“I'm learning how to live with the reality of war and the beauty of motherhood” | CBC First Person
I care for Ukraine
Part of my income goes toward supporting Ukraine: medicine, prosthetics, reabilitation.