For years, Viktoria Grokholska's practice was rooted in the precision of botanical illustration. Now her work is moving toward something else — figures carrying memory, fear and hope, painted in a language of symbol rather than exact form.
Viktoria Grokholska is a contemporary Ukrainian artist and botanical illustrator, a member of the Association of Botanical Artists of Ukraine. In her practice, she combines the academic precision of botanical illustration with the language of contemporary art, exploring the relationship between a person, nature and memory. She works mainly in watercolor and oil painting, producing work distinguished by its attention to detail, light and organic form.
Alongside her own artistic practice, she has developed an educational side to her work, giving individual painting and botanical illustration lessons in her own creative studio in Kyiv. Her approach centers on building technical skill, forming an individual artistic style, and providing professional curatorial guidance along the way. Her work is held in private collections in Ukraine, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and other countries. She takes part regularly in exhibition projects, and works to popularize contemporary Ukrainian art through educational and curatorial initiatives.
"My work is an invitation to slow down, look more closely at the natural world, and discover beauty in details that often go unnoticed."
Recently, her practice has been going through an important transformation. For many years she worked mainly in botanical illustration and realist painting; today she is increasingly drawn to contemporary symbolism. It's a natural stage in her development as an artist, she says — a wish to move beyond the exact reproduction of form and begin speaking in a language of image, metaphor and psychological state.
Figuration has begun to appear in her new work. Human figures become carriers of inner experience — memory, fear, hope, and the search for one's own identity. She's interested less in the portrait of a person than in their inner world, in what's often impossible to put into words; symbols, plants, birds, natural phenomena and objects become a kind of language through which she explores emotional states and a person's relationship with themselves and the world around them.
Despite this new direction, botany remains an inseparable part of her work — the foundation that shaped her attentiveness to detail, composition and observation of nature. That knowledge is now folding into her contemporary work, where plant motifs no longer simply document nature's beauty but take on symbolic meaning of their own.
Beyond her own series, she continues to actively develop the educational side of her practice, working individually with students in her studio. What matters to her there isn't simply teaching technique, but helping each student find their own artistic voice, shape a personal style, and learn to think through art. In this publication, she wanted to show precisely this moment of transition — from botanical precision toward the symbolic language of contemporary art: the story of an artist unafraid to change, to explore new subjects, and to search for deeper ways of speaking about a person, their psychology, and their fragile inner world.
More of her work can be found on Instagram @viktoria.gro.art.