It is an important time to look at their work. Hundreds of the country\u2019s cultural institutions have been deliberately damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks since the war started. Russia knows well that the arts are the people\u2019s route to accessing and understanding their nation\u2019s culture \u2014 destroy them, and you go some way to destroying the tools of nationhood. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I download it before we speak, and have a play around. Once you\u2019ve 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 \u201cSummer Solstice\u201d; mood (\u201cplayful\u201d, \u201cerotic\u201d, \u201cdark\u201d, \u201cempowering\u201d); or simply by price. Prices range from a couple of hundred euros up to about \u20ac10,000, with an average of about \u20ac1,300 (roughly \u00a31,100). <\/p>\n
\u2022 Read art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s fun and straightforward, even if the quality varies. The \u201cfeatured\u201d feed is curated to mitigate this by a small team that includes an ex-Christie\u2019s specialist, and here there is some lovely stuff. Among the drawings, Oksana Duchenchuk\u2019s graphite works of light and weather in a forest are very beautiful, while Sasha Luneva\u2019s curious cartoon-like drawings in coloured pencil feel like a surrealist take on Paul Colin\u2019s 1920s lithograph homages to Josephine Baker. <\/p>\n I like Caro de Valk\u2019s 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\u2019s cheerful Chrysanthemums is a joyful flower painting; Daphne Klagkou\u2019s ceramic and blown glass sculpture The Birth makes me feel protective and uncomfortable at the same time. <\/p>\n Yehor Dulin, an artist from Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine<\/p>\n Daphne Klagkou with one of her works<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are just now dealing with one case like that,\u201d 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\u2019s loved ones can benefit from their work. <\/p>\n \u2022 Treasures of Ukrainian modern art smuggled to safety<\/a><\/p>\n Another artist lost to the conflict, Igor Selemenev, \u201chas a very particular style, he\u2019s completely unknown. We want to make a specific exhibition dedicated to him.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n \u201cBut despite the circumstances, he wasn\u2019t \u2018dark\u2019 at all,\u201d Serdiuk says. She has audio recordings of hours of conversations with him. \u201cI have recently listened to them. They are full of life, playfulness and radiant hope.\u201d<\/p>\n Igor Selemenev in his studio. The artist died earlier this year but Serdiuk is determined to exhibit his paintings<\/p>\n Selemenev\u2019s painting of a still-life with a statuette of Anubis<\/p>\n Now she\u2019s trying to build a tangible legacy for him. \u201cWe just digitised all his works, which is good \u2014 he directed us to them, so we at least now have a full archive.\u201d One of his best, a portrait head of a woman titled Marie Antoinette with A Coral Ear, hangs in her flat. <\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe first seed\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n And the conversation on the train, it transpires, was about the philosophy of Hannah Arendt \u2014 notably, the German-American political theorist\u2019s views on art. In a very small nutshell, Arendt described man as \u201chomo faber\u201d, 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. <\/p>\n![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/420a26f6-1751-4854-8d29-943bfd32eca3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/d1bc581e-f827-4f64-8047-0206e44a1695.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Igor](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/c55c5232-ffbf-4dd8-ac07-16a9270cc7fb.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/90488084-9022-487d-bf54-b1c2240a5ff9.jpg\")
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