It was a chance conversation with a professor of philosophy, while on a 14-hour railway journey between Poland and Kyiv, that switched Kateryna Serdiuk on to the power of art. At the time she was a financier who was living in London and working for UBS, but also, after Russia’s invasion in 2022, helping Ukraine’s Ministry of Health to automate its medical procurement system — one does what one can in wartime, right? She had no real interest in art at all.
“I’m from eastern Ukraine, a very industrial place,” she tells me, speaking from her light-filled Kyiv apartment, a painting of a leopard with a man’s head on the wall behind her. “My family has nothing to do with art. I studied finance.”
So it’s perhaps surprising that she is behind Subjektiv, a new art-sales app that aims to be accessible to anyone — something she feels is missing from the art world (we’ll get back to her encounter with the mysterious professor later). The app is international, with work by artists from Portugal, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Canada and more, but one thing that marks it out is the high proportion of Ukrainian artists represented.
It is an important time to look at their work. Hundreds of the country’s cultural institutions have been deliberately damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks since the war started. Russia knows well that the arts are the people’s route to accessing and understanding their nation’s culture — destroy them, and you go some way to destroying the tools of nationhood.
Subjektiv provides a quiet counter to that, giving buyers direct access into the studios of artists living and working in a place that the foreign office still cautions against travelling to.
I download it before we speak, and have a play around. Once you’ve created a profile you get a timeline on which you see a constantly updated feed of artworks uploaded directly by artists and galleries. You can browse by medium (painting, drawing, photography); theme, such as “Summer Solstice”; mood (“playful”, “erotic”, “dark”, “empowering”); or simply by price. Prices range from a couple of hundred euros up to about €10,000, with an average of about €1,300 (roughly £1,100).
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It’s fun and straightforward, even if the quality varies. The “featured” feed is curated to mitigate this by a small team that includes an ex-Christie’s specialist, and here there is some lovely stuff. Among the drawings, Oksana Duchenchuk’s graphite works of light and weather in a forest are very beautiful, while Sasha Luneva’s curious cartoon-like drawings in coloured pencil feel like a surrealist take on Paul Colin’s 1920s lithograph homages to Josephine Baker.
I like Caro de Valk’s strange little painted abstractions, and her witty, mysterious ceramics marked all over with geometric shapes that look like some sort of lost language. Yehor Dulin’s cheerful Chrysanthemums is a joyful flower painting; Daphne Klagkou’s ceramic and blown glass sculpture The Birth makes me feel protective and uncomfortable at the same time.
Yehor Dulin, an artist from Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine
Daphne Klagkou with one of her works
The night before I speak to Serdiuk there were drone attacks, she tells me matter of factly. Six people are dead this morning, and homes have been destroyed. This is the unthinkable normal. Some of the artists represented on the app have lost their lives since they uploaded their work.
“We are just now dealing with one case like that,” she says. Her start-up team is in the surreal position of occasionally administering not just growing sales, but the back end of death, so that an artist’s loved ones can benefit from their work.
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Another artist lost to the conflict, Igor Selemenev, “has a very particular style, he’s completely unknown. We want to make a specific exhibition dedicated to him.” Selemenev had mostly lived in his studio for the past couple of years, on the fourth floor of an unserviced building, without heating or water. In his early fifties, he died at Easter this year from a heart attack after a blast near by, which blew out his windows. Most of his friends were gone, and he was struggling emotionally with the war, particularly because his father had spent a long time in Russia serving in the Soviet army in the north.
“But despite the circumstances, he wasn’t ‘dark’ at all,” Serdiuk says. She has audio recordings of hours of conversations with him. “I have recently listened to them. They are full of life, playfulness and radiant hope.”
Igor Selemenev in his studio. The artist died earlier this year but Serdiuk is determined to exhibit his paintings
Selemenev’s painting of a still-life with a statuette of Anubis
Now she’s trying to build a tangible legacy for him. “We just digitised all his works, which is good — he directed us to them, so we at least now have a full archive.” One of his best, a portrait head of a woman titled Marie Antoinette with A Coral Ear, hangs in her flat.
But why is it important to her when just a few years ago she had no interest in art? That train journey, one of many trips Serdiuk made to her homeland before she moved back permanently, planted “the first seed”, she says.
And the conversation on the train, it transpires, was about the philosophy of Hannah Arendt — notably, the German-American political theorist’s views on art. In a very small nutshell, Arendt described man as “homo faber”, or one who makes. She considered art the highest form of making because it embodies memory, experience and meaning and helps us to make sense of the world. Arendt also believed that learning to respond critically to a work of art is an essential skill with real-life impact beyond the gallery.
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“We cannot make decisions about how we live together without the proper aesthetic education,” Serdiuk says with the zeal of a recent convert. “I was amazed by our discussion, and how all of that comes together. And then I came to Ukraine and I met, quite accidentally, with a lot of artists, and I started to realise how different the attitude towards art is here.”
In the west, she says, “especially now, art is a lot about self-expression. Here in Ukraine it’s about mastery — about what is the best thing, the most beautiful, the most moving thing you can achieve. I’ve heard it from many artists. They told me we’ve seen what man is capable of in the worst possible sense — the horrors of Bucha [where hundreds of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in 2022], the [attacks on the] suburbs of Kyiv. The problem is that we are lacking evidence of what man is capable of in the best sense. And art can be a symbol of the grandeur of man.”
Even in the midst of war, she says, the city’s communal services will come and clean, and plant trees. “Every person is trying to multiply the beauty. And art is mirroring the same thing.”