About Me

I’m drawn to the quiet stories that pass almost unnoticed—moments that sit between gestures, glances, and silences. Much of life happens on the edges of attention, and my work focuses on what stays there: memory, myth, longing, and the tension between closeness and distance. I use nuance, fragmentation, and suggestion to explore queer and mixed-race identities, tenderness, solitude, displacement, and the uncomfortable contradictions that shape how people move through the world.

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I was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and Nigerian father, and grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. These different worlds formed the backdrop of my early life, often overlapping in ways I didn’t fully understand. The mix of cultures, languages, and expectations taught me to see identity as unstable—something that shifts, adapts, and doesn’t always add up neatly. I learned to pay attention to what is half-seen or partially remembered, to the moments that don’t fit into a clear narrative.

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Painting became a way to work through these in-between states. My compositions often combine the familiar with elements that feel slightly off or out of place. I’m interested in scenes that hold tension: pauses, shadows, fragments of space or body language that suggest more than they reveal. Each painting functions as a brief moment suspended in time. Viewers are invited to slow down, but not necessarily to feel comfortable.

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My time at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels helped me refine this approach—shaping a practice centered on observation, ambiguity, and restraint. Since then, I’ve exhibited internationally and worked across disciplines, using each project to continue examining personal and inherited histories. A recent solo show - A Soft Gaze Upon the Other - at Projectspace 38.40 in Amsterdam, part of which later traveled to CICA Museum in South Korea and the BARBICAN Arts Group Trust in London, allowed me to reflect on how these themes have evolved, and I’m currently preparing new work for an upcoming museum exhibition in the Netherlands scheduled for the end of 2026.

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Across all of this, what drives me is the desire to create images that don’t settle. I’m not aiming for clarity or resolution. I want the work to provoke, to shift people out of certainty, to hold both discomfort and curiosity at the same time. If my paintings stay with viewers, I hope it’s because they raise questions rather than answer them—because something in the image resists closure and keeps insisting on a second look.