Olya Avstreyh is an artist from Russia, a graduate of the Department of Contemporary Painting at the Higher School of Economics, School of Design (2021), University of Westminster (London, 2013) and Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moscow, 2010). She has had solo exhibitions in Lugano, Basel and Moscow (“Odd Winds”, Seréne gallery, Lugano, Switzerland, 2024, “When We Poke It, the Blood Runs and We Find Ourselves in a Belly”, OBDN x Voskhod Gallery, Basel, Switzerland, 2023, “Confusions”, сцена/szena gallery, Moscow, 2023). Participant of group projects and contemporary art fairs, including “The Rite of Spring”, Auction Collective, London, UK (2020), “Labelled by Vasari”, CCA Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (2023), “Monsters Under the Bed”, MaxArt Foundation, St Petersburg, Russia (2022) and more. Currently lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Olya Avstreyh is a multidisciplinary artist, but the focus of her work is painting. Her signature technique refers to the nervous energy of Cecily Brown, but retains the lively pastosity of the brushstroke: Avstreyh prefers working freely on canvas, where the layering of colours provides a simultaneous layering of meanings. She finds inspiration for her subjects in photographs of her models – friends, archives and 1970s-1980s folk-horror movies: in this way she juxtaposes her own psychogeographical drift with details of interiors, postures of characters, the specific mood of a particular work and finds an unexpected coincidence to transfer onto the canvas. 

The main theme of Avstreyh’s research is the human body as a source of experience and endless transformations. At the centre of her work lie the female bodies of characters in their transition from girlhood to womanhood: they undergo discomfort, confusion and discontentment, experiencing a universal and at the same time personal fulfilment of their individual experience of metamorphosis from one state to another, from one personal drama to the following one. This transition becomes a kind of transformation-journey, similar to the route of Virginia Woolf’s opus magnum character, Orlando. This text is very significant to Avstreyh and became the inspirational basis for the “Odd Winds” project  (2023): the gender of the characters in her recent works is transposed beyond the work, allowing Avstreyh to focus on the individual and the search for the true essence of herself. Literary text often inspires the artist, but always remains bracketed in the form of small poems in the margins of her sketches, which she fragments into close-ups, much like the human figures in her paintings. 

Avstreyh’s works become a self-reflection on the transformation of the outer and the inner, the endless search for meaning and content in herself. By levelling the canvas into a safe space, she places in it symbolic artefacts that indicate fragility and vulnerability: porcelain and seashells, while the upturned faces and flexed bodies of the character models become a dedication to the containment of emotions and the subsequent detachment from them. The diverse archetypes of Avstreyh’s characters represent different versions of herself: balancing between extremely high or extremely low emotional registers, disempowerment and seething energy, they reflect the confusion and constant sense of alienation, the search for self that marks her generation today.