Olena Kurzel

Olena Kurzel (b. 2000, Yuzhnoukrainsk, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, sculpture and installation. Since 2025, she has been based in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2023, she graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAFAA), specializing in monumental and easel painting.

In her artistic practice, she works with the themes of memory, landscapes from her childhood, and explores the relationship between humans and nature. Over the past few years, she has been working extensively with the themes of post-humanity and ecocide, examining how human activity affects the state of the planet today and how it will continue to shape its future. She works with speculative mythology, using existing mythological images and transforming them into new characters. In this way, she seeks to create a world in which mythical creatures survive under contemporary conditions marked by humanity’s invasive intervention in nature, while imagining possible scenarios for the future.

Over the past few years, she has been working extensively with the medium of papier-mache and striving to create multimedia projects that combine it with painting and video, while further developing it within the format of installation. For her, artistic mediums are primarily a way of telling the stories she wants to share. Because of this, she often shifts between different mediums and combines them with one another. It is also very important for her to work with upcycling, which is why she uses reclaimed textiles and recycled paper in her works.

She has participated in exhibitions at ZIEGEL Gallery (Graz), Ukrainian House (Kyiv), SPLAV (Kyiv), the Transcarpathian Museum of Architecture and Culture (Uzhhorod), Asortymentna Kimnata (Ivano-Frankivsk), DIM Gallery (Warsaw), Office Ukraine & Kollektiv Zirkusgasse (Vienna), Open Space (Chemnitz), and Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv), among others.

(Photo © Karina Synytsia)