Nikolina Kovalenko
Nikolina Kovalenko, a Brooklyn-based painter with an MFA from the Moscow Art Institute, is best known for her immersive large-scale coral reef paintings and multidimensional portraiture. Her work explores themes of transformation, inner essence, and the delicate balance between humans and nature. Her work has been exhibited globally, including at MOMMA, L’Space Gallery, Clark Gallery, and Blumka Contemporary. She has shown in the USA, UK, UAE, Sweden, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, China, Belgium, and Iceland, collaborating with organizations like Museum Week and UNESCO. Nikolina also collaborates with the Georgie Badiel Foundation, supporting clean water access in Burkina Faso. Her Utopian Reefscapes series, highlighting vanishing marine ecosystems, was featured in Forbes Mexico, reflecting her commitment to increase environmental awareness through art
" Throughout my art practice, I have been deeply interested in humanity’s psychological connection with nature and the consequences our everyday actions have on the environment. My past work has focused on fragile ecosystems, with artwork inspired by locations specific to each project, exploring themes ranging from coral bleaching and deforestation to cultural associations with the natural world. Lately, I have been enjoying channeling my inner Baroque and embracing intuitive world building, where the only thing that makes sense is the new feeling shapes, colors and textures create as they interact and morph into one another.
My current series explores transformation as a process of unbecoming - shedding imposed identities, conditioned beliefs, and inherited narratives to reveal an original self. The organic, fluid forms blossom, sprout, crack, dissolve, shed and regenerate in an endless cycle of becoming and unbecoming. I seek out shapes that feel familiar at first glance, but the longer you look, the more uncertain you become of what you’re seeing, much like how we think we know ourselves until we realize how much remains to be learned.
Rooted in both psychological and environmental themes, my paintings blur the boundary between inner and outer worlds, further exploring the Hermetic maxim, “As above, so below; as within, so without; as the universe, so the soul,” which suggests that spiritual, mental, and physical realms are interconnected, with internal states or higher forces influencing external reality and vice versa.
For me, this work is about transcending boundaries and recognizing the deep interconnectedness that unites us-something our increasingly divided world is longing to remember. "
Nikolina Kovalenko