Yurii Vatkin
Юрій Ваткін
b. 1975 · Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine
Yurii Vatkin is a Kharkiv-based abstract painter who moved from realism through expressionism to a colour-driven abstraction rooted in nature. He works in thick, visually tactile impasto strokes, treating each canvas as a record of his emotional state at the moment of painting. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2008, he has exhibited in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Prague, London, Milan, Luxembourg, Glasgow and New York.
Yurii Anatoliiovych Vatkin was born on 6 June 1975 in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro); his family moved to the Kharkiv region in 1977 and he grew up in the village of Cherkaski Tyshky. From 1989 to 1991 he took private lessons from the Kharkiv graphic artist Oleksandr Brahin, and at sixteen entered the industrial design department of the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute (now the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts), studying there from 1991 to 1994. He then left art for nearly two decades to work in agriculture, returning to painting after a 2008 reunion with his former teacher. He joined the National Union of Artists of Ukraine in 2008 and held his first solo exhibition at the Kharkiv Art Museum in 2010. His work has since developed as a sequence of series — "The Subconscious", "Touch of Season", "Nature Breeze", "Concrete Jungles", "Metallic Shapes" (which combines acrylic painting with sculpture) and "The War". Solo and group showings include the VOVATANYA gallery in Kharkiv (2012, 2017, 2018), the Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kyiv and the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery (both "Through the Smell", 2013), ART Kyiv Contemporary at Mystetskyi Arsenal (2011, 2013, 2014), ARTSTAQ Exchange in London and Prague (2016–17), the KMBS Gallery and Kyiv Art Museum (2023), the Mriya gallery of Ukrainian modern art in New York (2023) and art fairs in Budapest, Milan, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Luxembourg. In February 2022 Russian troops occupied Cherkaski Tyshky within hours of the invasion; Vatkin and his teenage son remained in his studio there for 72 days before evacuating to Kharkiv, and he continued painting throughout. His work is in private collections in more than twenty countries.
Art Movements
Modernism
Modernism was a radical, early-to-mid-20th-century cultural movement that broke with traditional artistic, literary, and social forms to align with a rapidly industrializing world. Characterized by experimentation, abstraction, and individualism, it sought new modes of expression to address themes of alienation and social change following World War I. Rejection of Tradition: Modernists rejected Victorian morality, academic art, and realistic depictions of subjects, seeking to "make it new". Experimentation: A shift towards abstraction in art (e.g., Cubism) and new techniques in literature, such as stream of consciousness (e.g., Virginia Woolf, James Joyce). Key Themes: Focused on subjectivity, alienation, the fragmentation of reality, and the quest for new meaning. Architecture & Design: Marked by minimalism, functionalism, and the use of industrial materials, famously summarized by Le Corbusier’s "a building is a machine for living in". Time Period: Roughly 1890s–1960s, emerging in Europe and America as a response to urbanization and technological advances.
Explore movement →1991–presentContemporary Ukrainian Painting
Painting made in independent Ukraine, from the 1991 declaration of independence onward. It is pluralist rather than programmatic: plein-air landscape and psychological portraiture continue alongside conceptual, minimalist and symbolist strands, with a marked turn after 2014 and especially after 2022 toward wartime subjects, national memory and the vernacular Ukrainian village.
Explore movement →Works by Yurii Vatkin
Plants Labirynth
A dense, all-over tangle of plant forms dissolved into impasto strokes. The artist describes wanting to merge with the labyrinths that nature builds.
Colors of the Unconscious
A square canvas from Vatkin's central "Unconscious" theme, built from heavy textured strokes and described by the artist as a fairy-tale landscape of the changeable mind.
Golden Armour
A horizontal abstraction dominated by burnished golds and ochres, part of the body of work Vatkin made after evacuating his occupied village near Kharkiv.
Clash of Reflections
A recent abstraction in which mirrored colour masses collide across the canvas, continuing the artist's signature coarse impasto handling.