BIO

Katya Tishkevich (b.1991, Minsk, Belarus) is a Belarusian artist working in oil and watercolour painting. Her painterly research centre on affect as a language tool — how it is bodily processed, visually communicated, and experienced by the viewer. Her thematic concerns are violence and its aftermath, grief, and death.
A finalist of the 17th Arte Laguna Prize in Painting (Venice, 2023), Tishkevich has exhibited in New York, Berlin, Venice, St. Petersburg, and Minsk, including A.I.R. Gallery, Beverly’s, and Wolf & Galentz. Her work is held in the public collection of the Museum of 20–21 Century Art of St. Petersburg and in private collections internationally. She co-curated HEARTBEAT at Wolf & Galentz, Berlin, and ASH at Vershy, Minsk. Tishkevich trained in easel and monumental painting at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design in St. Petersburg and the Glebov State Art College in Minsk, and completed a course in art criticism and art writing at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.


With a background in easel and monumental painting, I primarily engage in abstract-figurative painting and drawing, employing oil and watercolour as my mediums. My work explores the emotional depth and communicative clarity of visual language, investigating themes such as death, violence, grief, pain expressed through the agonizing body. Rooted in my personal experiences, reflections, and attitudes, my art aims to evoke specific emotions and nuances of sensations, approaching these themes with intensity, while distilling the complexities of the experience of being to the emotional clarity and monumentality of the visual sign.

Alternating between watercolour and oil painting, I approach watercolour as embodied reflections and a means to process personal trauma, intertwined with external crises. Spanning a palette from neon pink to clotted, bloody red, I explore the variety of emotional nuances from innocence and naivety to crudity and pain. While in painting I seek to condense multilayered experiences communicated through colour signs, carrying meaning inseparately with form. 

Starting from intuition, inner listening, and somatic response, I rely on singular material extracted from reality, crystallising the form and consciously avoiding appropriation of visual language while insisting on my position as an author. Based on introspective observation, I (de)(re)construct lived and imagined experiences, articulating a multitude of sensations through emotionally precise visual language. Constructing a clear informative message, charged with dense energy, I aim to leave an emotional trace, producing a strong psychophysical encounter across a broad affective spectrum.

I approach painting as a language of sensations, expanding its communicative capacities and pose the question:
How can philosophical thought unfold not by illustrating concepts, but by embodying them in painting - becoming sensible philosophy itself?

ARTIST STATEMENT