YANA MALANII
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SERIES
Witness
Witness is a series that explores painting as an act of witnessing rather than an act of making.
The witness is not the subject of these works. It is the position from which they are made.
What remains of a figure when it stops being a protagonist and becomes only a witness — present, but never acting? The figure here does not explain, decide, or tell a story. It remains.
Each painting investigates a different mode of witnessing — up to the moment when the witness stops observing and becomes what it was observing.
The series does not seek to interpret events or offer conclusions. Instead, it asks how painting can hold presence without turning it into narrative, symbol, or the event itself.
ABOUT
I am a Ukrainian artist working with abstract painting.
Witnessing is the position from which I paint. I am interested not in the event, but in presence; not in action, but in what remains after it. My works do not illustrate ideas or offer answers. They create a space in which painting becomes an act of witnessing.
My practice is grounded in physical engagement with material. Layers of paint, scratches, and drips are not decorative elements but traces of process. Forms emerge and dissolve, and figures exist on the threshold between appearance and disappearance, between visibility and absence.
Born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.
ABOUT
I am a Ukrainian artist working with abstract painting.
Witnessing is the position from which I paint. I am interested not in the event, but in presence; not in action, but in what remains after it. My works do not illustrate ideas or offer answers. They create a space in which painting becomes an act of witnessing.
My practice is grounded in physical engagement with material. Layers of paint, scratches, and drips are not decorative elements but traces of process. Forms emerge and dissolve, and figures exist on the threshold between appearance and disappearance, between visibility and absence.
Born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.