Snisarenko Gallery Receives ART KYIV Gallery Awards 2025

“I am very proud to work with Yulianna Verba. This year, her work received outstanding feedback at our art shows in Los Angeles, both from collectors and from the professional community. Based on that experience, I was confident that a solo presentation at ART KYIV would be successful - not only from a curatorial perspective, but also in terms of audience response and sales. This project confirmed the strength and clarity of her artistic practice across different markets”

Lia Snisarenko

The recognition affirms the gallery’s commitment to curatorial rigor and positions this presentation as a significant contribution to the fair’s evolving discourse on the relationship between individual artistic practice and the structures that frame its reception.

The award was granted in acknowledgment of a project that demonstrated exceptional curatorial coherence, artistic integrity, and a critically considered approach to the art fair format. In a context where booths often function as compact inventories, sites of rapid viewing and accelerated decision-making, Snisarenko Gallery proposed a focused, research-driven solo presentation that unfolded as a unified artistic statement. The booth resisted the imperative toward breadth and instead privileged depth, constructing an environment where sustained engagement became both possible and necessary.

Snisarenko Gallery, based in Los Angeles, operates at the intersection of contemporary art, curatorial research, and transnational dialogue. Since its founding, the gallery has collaborated with artists whose practices explore the existential, philosophical, and symbolic dimensions of contemporary life, often situating their work within frameworks that transcend purely formal or market-driven considerations. The gallery’s program privileges long-term development over short-term visibility, sustained inquiry over seasonal production, and conceptual density over aesthetic spectacle.

Snisarenko Gallery was founded by Lia Snisarenko, a Los Angeles–based gallerist and art advisor with extensive experience in international art markets, particularly in the United States. Over the past decade, she has worked closely with artists, collectors, and institutions across the U.S. and Europe, developing exhibitions, art fair presentations, and private sales within the primary art market.

Lia’s practice is shaped by a deep understanding of how the U.S. art market operates - its structures, expectations, and long-term relationship-building. Her curatorial approach focuses on clarity, coherence, and meaning, prioritizing focused presentations that allow artists’ practices to unfold with depth and intention rather than scale or spectacle. Through Snisarenko Gallery, she positions Ukrainian contemporary artists within an international context, creating dialogue between local practices and global audiences.

At ART KYIV  Autumn Edition 2025, the gallery reaffirmed this curatorial stance through a carefully constructed solo presentation that foregrounded meaning, continuity, and conceptual depth, qualities that often resist the temporal and spatial constraints of the fair format but which, when successfully realized, can redefine what such formats might accommodate.

Her work operates within a lineage of artists who approach abstraction and figuration not as oppositional modes but as complementary languages through which to articulate metaphysical and psychological terrain.

Verba’s paintings construct environments populated by archetypal figures: wayfarers, observers, dualities, set within landscapes that function less as depictions of place than as projections of psychological and spiritual states. Her compositions avoid singular narrative resolution, instead proposing recursive structures where meaning emerges through repetition, variation, and the viewer’s active participation in assembling symbolic coherence. This approach aligns her work with traditions of symbolic modernism while simultaneously addressing contemporary concerns regarding subjectivity, agency, and the conditions of meaning-making in fragmented cultural contexts.

In recent years, Verba has expanded her practice into ceramic sculpture, introducing materiality, tactility, and the indexical trace of the hand as counterpoints to the expansive fields of her paintings. The ceramics function not as illustrations of pictorial motifs but as independent sites of inquiry, where the physicality of fired clay and the irreversibility of the kiln become metaphors for transformation, permanence, and the embodied nature of thought.

The solo project presented at ART KYIV 2025 brought together paintings and ceramic sculptures created in 2025, forming a cohesive visual and conceptual ecosystem. Central to the project were themes of wholeness, choice, joy, integrity, unity, and the cyclical return to the inner source, concerns that traverse philosophical, psychological, and spiritual registers without reducing to any single interpretive frame.

Rather than approaching these notions abstractly or didactically, Yulianna articulated them through a sequence of distinct yet interconnected works. The paintings included “I Am the Path,” “I Am Joy,” “Unity,” “I Am Integrity,” “At the Crossroads of Worlds,” and “The Choice.” The ceramic works included “The Game of Life,” “Trinity,” and “Inner Pillars.” Collectively, these works functioned as nodes within a broader symbolic system, addressing the human condition not as a fixed state but as a continuous process characterized by thresholds, returns, and the negotiation between inner imperatives and external realities.

The paintings executed in acrylic and oil pastel on canvas constructed expansive, symbolic landscapes populated by archetypal figures, pathways, thresholds, and dualities. Works such as “At the Crossroads of Worlds” and “The Choice” explicitly engaged with the iconography of decision and passage, presenting figures positioned at liminal sites where divergent trajectories become visible. These compositions refused linear narration, instead offering spaces for reflection where meaning emerges through recurrence, rhythm, and variation.

“I Am the Path,” and “I Am Joy” employed the first-person voice in their titles, a rhetorical strategy that collapsed the distance between viewer, artist, and depicted subject. This move positioned the work not as external observation but as articulated experience, identifying invitations with the conditions and possibilities the paintings proposed. The declarative structure of these titles suggested both affirmation and instruction, framing the act of viewing as participatory rather than passive.

The visual language across the paintings maintained consistent formal concerns: flattened pictorial depth, simplified figuration, restricted yet resonant color palettes, and compositional structures that emphasized balance, symmetry, and the interplay between figure and ground. These strategies allowed the works to function simultaneously as aesthetic objects and as carriers of symbolic content, resisting reduction to either pure formalism or illustrative symbolism.

The ceramic works introduced a material counterpoint to the paintings’ expansive fields. Fired clay and ceramic glaze became carriers of corporeality, touch, and temporality, qualities that grounded the project’s philosophical concerns in physical presence. Works such as “Trinity” and “Inner Pillars” emphasized the idea of inner structure and resilience, translating metaphysical inquiry into tangible, weight-bearing form.

“Trinity,” as its title suggests, engaged with triadic structures, symbolic configurations that recur across religious, philosophical, and psychological systems as representations of completeness, dialectical synthesis, or the reconciliation of dualities through a third term. The ceramic medium’s inherent stability and permanence reinforced these associations, allowing form and content to operate in productive tension.

“Inner Pillars” proposed the body or consciousness as architectural, composed of load-bearing elements that provide structure amid flux. The work’s verticality and solidity contrasted with the horizontal expansiveness of the paintings, establishing a formal dialogue between different modes of spatial and temporal engagement.

 The jury noted that the ceramics were not supplementary objects or decorative accompaniments but conceptual equals to the paintings, each medium addressing shared concerns through distinct material logics. This parity between media elevated the presentation beyond conventional hierarchies and positioned the booth as a site where interdisciplinary practice could be encountered in its full complexity.

The spatial organization of the booth was integral to the project’s impact and represented a deliberate curatorial intervention within the constraints of the fair format. Rather than maximizing density or prioritizing variety, the gallery opted for restraint and selectivity, allowing each work to occupy sufficient space while remaining in visible dialogue with the others. This pacing encouraged slow looking and sustained engagement, transforming the booth into a contemplative environment within the accelerated, often overwhelming rhythm of the art fair.

Motifs such as the path, the crossroads, the pillar, and the game of life reappeared across media, functioning as structural anchors rather than illustrative symbols. The repetition of these elements operated as a method of deepening; each recurrence invited viewers to encounter meaning not through novelty but through accumulation, return, and the gradual unfolding of symbolic resonance. This curatorial approach acknowledged that complexity and accessibility are not oppositional but can coexist when work is given adequate spatial and temporal conditions for reception.

The decision to present a solo project rather than a group exhibition was itself a curatorial statement. In the context of art fairs, where booths typically showcase multiple artists to appeal to diverse collector interests, a solo presentation constitutes a risk; it narrows potential markets while demanding that a single artistic practice carry the full weight of the gallery’s presence. Snisarenko Gallery’s willingness to assume this risk reflects confidence in both the artist’s work and the fair’s capacity to receive projects that resist conventional commercial logic.

The jury for the ART KYIV Gallery Awards 2025 highlighted the project’s capacity to negotiate the relationship between inner experience and external reality, between intuition and structure, fragility and permanence. In their statement, the jury emphasized that the presentation demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the solo format not merely as a commercial strategy but as a site of inquiry, where continuity and coherence become curatorial strategies in their own right.

The jury’s recognition extended beyond the individual works to encompass the gallery’s broader curatorial vision, its willingness to treat the art fair as a space for intellectual positioning and cultural contribution rather than exclusively as a transactional platform. The project exemplified how strong curatorial vision can coexist with accessibility, offering viewers a deeply resonant experience without sacrificing complexity or reducing symbolic content to easily consumable messaging.

In awarding the ART KYIV Gallery Awards 2025 to Snisarenko Gallery, the jury underscored the importance of galleries that challenge prevailing assumptions about what art fairs can accommodate and how artistic practices can be presented within commercially oriented contexts. The award functions as both recognition and encouragement, an acknowledgment of what has been achieved and an invitation for other participants to consider alternative models of presentation and engagement.

ART KYIV 2025 continues to establish itself as a significant platform for contemporary art in Ukraine, fostering dialogue between local and international practices while navigating the complex cultural, political, and economic conditions that shape artistic production and reception in the region. The fair has increasingly positioned itself not only as a marketplace but as a site of cultural assertion, where Ukrainian contemporary art is articulated within global discourses while retaining its particular historical and contextual specificity.

The presentation demonstrated how Ukrainian artistic voices can be articulated within a global contemporary art discourse that addresses universal concerns: questions of meaning, agency, integrity, and the negotiation between inner and outer worlds, while remaining grounded in personal and cultural specificity. Verba’s work does not announce its Ukrainian identity through overt iconography or explicit political content; instead, it participates in a broader European and international tradition of symbolic and existential inquiry, bringing to that tradition particular inflections shaped by her formation and ongoing practice.

This approach offers an alternative to models of cultural presentation that rely on exoticism, victimization, or the reduction of complex artistic practices to national or political categories. It positions Ukrainian contemporary art not as a peripheral phenomenon requiring special contextualization but as a fully integrated participant in global artistic discourse, one whose contributions are legible on aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical grounds rather than solely through identity markers.

The recognition of Snisarenko Gallery with the ART KYIV Gallery Awards 2025 affirms the value of curatorial approaches that prioritize depth, coherence, and intellectual rigor within the challenging conditions of the art fair format. Yulianna Verba’s solo presentation demonstrated that it remains possible and indeed necessary to propose alternatives to the dominant modes of fair participation, alternatives that treat art not merely as a commodity but as a carrier of meaning, as a site of inquiry, and as a space for sustained engagement.

The project’s success suggests that collectors, curators, and institutional representatives who attend art fairs are receptive to presentations that demand more than cursory attention, that reward sustained looking, and that propose art-making as an ongoing investigation rather than a series of discrete, consumable products. It reaffirms the possibility of using commercial platforms for cultural and intellectual work, demonstrating that these goals need not be mutually exclusive.

We congratulate Snisarenko Gallery and Yulianna Verba on receiving the ART KYIV Gallery Awards 2025 and extend our gratitude for a project that expanded the curatorial and artistic language of the fair, offering a model of practice that balances commercial viability with conceptual ambition, accessibility with complexity, and individual vision with collective cultural discourse.

Author: Valeriia Samoilenko