Anhelina Holembivska was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1996, and began painting in childhood with a clear intention of building her life around art. She studied book illustration and graphic techniques at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv before moving to Florence, Italy, to continue developing as a painter close to the origins of Renaissance art. Her early practice centered on watercolor, a medium she used to sharpen her observational precision before shifting toward a more layered, painterly language. Living in a city defined by Renaissance masterpieces steered her attention toward oil painting, a medium she felt offered new possibilities she hadn’t found in watercolor.
Botanical still life sits at the center of her practice, built on a dialogue between Northern European precision and the softer color logic of the Italian Renaissance. Floral passages from Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, the exactness of the Flemish school, and the emotional register of 19th-century French and English painting all surface in her compositions. She also draws on Eastern art, particularly Japanese woodblock prints, an influence that shows up most clearly in her bird paintings, where classical European rendering meets a compositional logic borrowed from Japanese aesthetics. The result is work that treats a bloom or a bird not as a static subject, but as a brief arrangement of light and structure caught mid-change: petals turning translucent at the edges, feathers rendered with a tension between softness and precision, backgrounds kept spare enough to let the central form hold all the weight.
Florence also placed her within a broader circle of contemporary realist painters, a community that shaped her outlook through shared practice and mutual exchange. She is now represented by Arcadia Contemporary in New York, and her paintings are held in private collections internationally and have appeared in art publications. In 2025, she presented her first duo exhibition in the United States, “Twofold”, alongside her husband and fellow painter Andrii Kateryniuk — a show built around roughly twenty new oil paintings that placed their individually developed sensibilities in direct conversation. Across still lifes and bird studies alike, her paintings share a commitment to structural clarity and restrained emotional weight, favoring quiet observation over spectacle.
More info: Website, Instagram.
in Bahia.