Before 2022, Darina Mikityuk's work moved through the Ukrainian art scene — exhibitions, auctions, features in Vogue and Playboy. Since relocating to Hamburg, her painting has turned inward, toward a harder question: what happens to identity, and to the body that carries it, after everything familiar has been taken apart.
Darina Mikityuk is a Ukrainian artist based in Hamburg, Germany, working across painting, drawing and mixed media. Her practice returns again and again to female identity, transformation, memory, sensuality, and the emotional relationship between body and perception — themes she renders in the bold colour and simplified form of contemporary Pop Art, fused with something more personal and less decorative underneath.
Before relocating to Germany in 2022, Mikityuk was an active presence in the Ukrainian art scene, showing work through exhibitions, international projects and art auctions. Her paintings have appeared in Vogue, Architectural Digest and Playboy, and are now held in private collections across Europe and the United States — a trajectory that gives her current work a particular vantage point, made by someone who built a career in one country and is now rebuilding a visual language in another.
"It's not about the event itself — it's about the state that follows, when the old structures dissolve and a new visual language begins to emerge."
Her current project, After the Shift, examines exactly that: how artistic perception changes under the pressure of personal and historical transformation. Rather than illustrating migration as an event, the work sits inside its aftermath — the disorientation, and eventually the new clarity, that follows the loss of familiar ground. Through painting, handwritten text and visual fragments, Mikityuk builds a dialogue between private experience and collective reality, using Pop Art's bold surfaces to carry something considerably heavier underneath.
Across the series, Mikityuk shifts the emphasis away from surface and decoration and toward emotional intensity — painting less as a finished image than as a space where transformation is still visibly happening. Identity, memory, language and the body recur as the project's working materials, treated not as fixed subjects but as things actively being renegotiated, brushstroke by brushstroke.
The palette shifts from canvas to canvas — acid yellows and greens give way to black and magenta, then to a muted, almost cinematic grayscale lit only by a flash of yellow — but the underlying grammar stays consistent: a figure half-dissolved into its background, features breaking apart and reforming, colour standing in for the emotional charge that words can't quite carry.
Even the smaller, quieter works follow the same logic. A figure rendered only in cool blue and burnt orange, framed and set against a wrought-iron railing outside the studio, extends the series beyond the wall and into the street — a reminder that these paintings were made to travel, not just to hang.
Mikityuk continues to develop After the Shift toward exhibition, and is open to conversations with galleries, curators and collectors interested in work that sits at the intersection of migration, identity and Pop Art's visual vocabulary. More of her work can be found at mykytiuk.de.