Oleksandr McQuartz is a Ukrainian contemporary artist whose practice moves across performance, body art, photography and installation. His work has been called provocative, political and deeply personal. He prefers to call it honest.
Oleksandr McQuartz — is a Ukrainian artist based in Kyiv, working primarily in performance, body art, photography and contemporary installation. He has been making work since 2010, building a practice that operates at the intersection of the physical and the political, the intimate and the social.
His pseudonym is not incidental. McQuartz carries a deliberate reference to Alexander McQueen — an artist who worked at the edge of fashion, provocation and mortality — and to quartz, a material that is simultaneously hard and transparent. The name describes the work: uncompromising in form, clear in intention.
"The body is the last territory that belongs to you. Everything else can be taken."
McQuartz's practice centres on the body — his own body, primarily — as both medium and subject. In his performances and photographs, the body appears in unusual or disorienting contexts: submerged in domestic interiors undergoing renovation, lying in fields and forests as if returned to the earth, placed inside closed rooms surrounded by the detritus of ordinary life. The images are formally precise and emotionally charged, oscillating between vulnerability and defiance.
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his work has taken on an additional dimension. McQuartz has continued to make art during the war — participating in international exhibitions and residencies, producing new work in conditions that most artists would consider impossible. For him, continuing to make art is itself a political act: a refusal to allow the destruction of cultural life to go unanswered.
His international profile has grown through participation in exhibitions in Germany, Poland, Austria and beyond, as well as through residencies that have taken him across Europe. He has shown in gallery contexts and in public spaces, in institutional settings and in informal ones. The work travels well — not because it is decorative, but because the questions it asks are not specific to any single country or context.
In Ukraine, McQuartz is also known as an activist and a figure in the queer cultural scene, a community that has faced particular pressures both before and during the war. His work has always engaged with questions of identity, visibility and the right to occupy space — questions that have become more urgent, not less, since 2022.
McQuartz is currently based between Kyiv and various European cities, continuing to develop new work and seeking exhibition opportunities and residency partnerships. He is open to collaboration with galleries, cultural institutions and independent curators who are interested in contemporary Ukrainian art that does not soften its edges.