Nataliia Ivaniv used to work in digital design, where everything lives on a flat screen and nothing has weight. Then she left that world, picked up a palette knife, and started building paintings you want to touch.
Nataliia Ivaniv is a contemporary Ukrainian painter from Ivano-Frankivsk, working in abstract heavy impasto — a technique that involves building thick, sculptural layers of acrylic paint to create surfaces with real physical depth. Every mark from her palette knife catches actual light. Every ridge and groove records the pressure of a hand, the direction of a movement, the mood of a moment.
Before painting, she spent years in the digital industry. That background shapes how she thinks about her work now: as a deliberate turn away from the smooth, weightless surfaces of screens, toward something tactile and immediate. The shift changed not just her medium but her perception of the world itself — the way she notices texture, light, the surface of things.
"The world is oversaturated with fast digital images. I offer something else — slowness, meditative contemplation, and a return to the raw materiality of nature."
At the centre of her practice is a sustained investigation of nature — its cycles, its emotional states, its textures. Water appears throughout her work as both subject and metaphor: its shifting depths, its currents, its capacity to record time. A body of water, for Nataliia, is not just a landscape element but a kind of archive — a surface that holds what has passed through it.
Her palette is predominantly deep, near-monochromatic blue — a colour she uses to explore the interaction of light and shadow, to create spaces that feel both meditative and monumental. Within that range, the paintings shift dramatically: from the dense, rhythmic darkness of "Midnight Rain," which evokes the psychological weight of stillness after nightfall, to the layered turbulence of "Deep Blue Abyss," where a calm surface conceals violent movement beneath.
"Troyandy Storm" — Rose Storm — marks a departure: a new work with a warmer, more dynamic palette, expressing passion and elemental force through expressive texture. It suggests that Nataliia's practice is not fixed within a single emotional register but continues to expand and surprise.
In 2026, her work was exhibited in two shows in Odesa — "Tonki Materii" (Subtle Matters) and BB Gallery — placing her within an active contemporary art scene that continues to function and grow despite the pressures of war. The exhibitions mark an artist who is not waiting for better conditions but working within the ones she has.
Nataliia is open to new exhibition projects and collaborations. Her portfolio is available on Saatchi Art and her process can be followed on Instagram at @art.natalia.iv.