Exhibition
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Iryna Maksymova.
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
Iryna Maksymova
Ukraine, b. 1991, Kolomyia
Iryna Maksymova is a Ukrainian figurative artist born in Kolomyia in 1991, who works primarily with painting and collaged textiles. Trained in graphic design at Lviv Polytechnic, she transitioned to painting as her primary practice around 2020 — the same year the world contracted, and the same year that would precede the full-scale invasion of her country. These two events are not unrelated in her work. Art, for Maksymova, has always been a form of presence: a way of staying inside the body, inside the moment, inside the self, when everything outside threatens to dissolve those boundaries.
Her visual language is rooted in the folklore and “naïve” narratives of Ukrainian folk painting, drawing on the early twentieth-century avant-garde — particularly Neo-Primitivism — to construct images in which body, myth, and landscape are inseparable. What matters, in her work, is the lived experience of the body: feeling it, listening to it, and learning to love it as a whole. Wholeness, for Maksymova, does not mean perfection. It means acceptance — honouring one’s desires and recognising the body as a living record of scars, pleasure, illness, joy, and endurance.
Animals and mythological beings move through her canvases as talismans and witnesses. Swans guard spaces of love and inner balance; horses embody loyalty, strength, and endurance; angels, mavky, and ritual dances become symbols of protection, unity, and connection to the land. The female figure that recurs throughout her work is not limited to gender — she becomes a universal symbol of country, home, and spirit. In Ukrainian, the word Ukraine is grammatically feminine, and since the full-scale invasion of 2022, this image has transformed for Maksymova into something more urgent: a protector — young, vulnerable, yet relentless.
For this exhibition, Maksymova presents a textile work composed of fabric fragments collected in Ukraine. Each fragment carries its own material memory — stitched together rather than declared, held by thread rather than certainty.
Since 2020, Maksymova has exhibited widely in Ukraine, Europe, Asia, and North America, with shows in London, Berlin, Madrid, Beijing, Taipei, Los Angeles, and New York. Her work has been acquired by significant private and institutional collections
across Europe and North America. Wherever You Go, There You Are is her first exhibition in Portugal.
Eritage Art Gallery, Lisbon · March — June 2026
Javiera Gart
Wherever You Go, There You Are | Exhibition
