
Olha Pryymak

About
Olha Pryymak is a Ukrainian-born artist based in London, graduating in 2023 from Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting. Her most recent shows include: ‘Positions (Part One)’ Alma Pearl Gallery, London 2023, 'High Official at Scoop' Saatchi Gallery, London 2023, 'Friends and Family' Hong Kong Art Basel OVR with Pi Artworks 2022, 'Stand with Ukraine' fundraising exhibition, Hales Gallery, London 2022, RAW at Soho Revue, London 2022 and the Festival of Intimacy, UCL, London, 2021.
Work is currently showing at:
London School of Economics, At the Heart of War: Ukrainian resilience and resistance through art, hosted by LSE Festival, 'People and Change'
Alma Pearl Gallery, 'Positions', a two-part exhibition curated by the writer and critic John Slyce, 10 June - 5 August, Haggerston, London
STUDIO WEST, 'The Angel in the House', an exhibition of six UK-based female painters, 22 June - 20 July, Notting Hill, London
Statement

Olha Pryymak collects plants and their cultural meanings. Her most recent body of work takes the viewer to the Wild Garden on Regent’s Canal in front of Alma Pearl Gallery, originated by the Wild Gardeners of Haggerston. As she tends to the garden, marking the changes in plants’ growth, their flourishing and decay, she plays out the drama in her paintings, animating them in relation to the hidden, spirit-like, disembodied female characters entangled in an intimate relationship with the plants. The structure of the project stems from a fairy play from the ecofeminist 'Forest Song' by Lesya Ukrainka (1911).
Image credit @ Gregor Petrikovic
Can’t believe you are sharing this, this could save the world
To seduce with the beauty first
Thanks for the tea and asks for planes
Gender is very limiting in a song
February
Made fictions about self and repeated addendum
90% perfect
Desires stated
First sense of communal life-threatening danger, aged 6
Sunflower project
The Sunflower project traced the first nine months of the 2022 war: growing sunflowers from the seed with Olha's parents displaced to East London, telling their story haptically through planting, writing and painting; painting being the most persistent form of archival culture. To keep a clear head from the grief over what was going on - Olha looked to plants.
It's always been about the plants, the family having worked on land, practising household herbalism. The initial attack on Crimea and Donbass in 2014 felt like an attack on collective identity. Plants that arrived from the family still then back in Ukraine in care packages became the only tangible and real roots to hold on to, they became main protagonists of the painting and the medium in tea sessions - participatory performances where participants get to experience the plant with multiple senses: touch, smell and taste.
Through these staged encounters over tea, cultural meanings of plants became prominent: specifically cultural histories steeped in folk traditions of meaning making - the prism through which to look at life when things get hard, a lot of it as a survival mechanism: foraging, growing, nourishing and conjuring, marking passage of time, venerating the dead. Painting for Olha is one such mechanism - the plants being its main protagonists and placeholders of memories and evolving narratives, but also of hope and resilience.
Click here for more information and work on this project.
Medium: oil on linen
Size: 130x90cm