Elena Kovalskaya (born 1971)

Russian artist, graduate of the Environmental Design Department at MGUTU. She works in the field of abstract art, exploring the medial possibilities of painting and graphics.

Kovalskaya’s artistic statements focus on interpreting human emotional and sensory states through the lens of time, impermanence, and the phenomenon of the moment’s irreversibility.

Her visual language emerges at the intersection of lyrical abstraction and expressive gesture, where each element of the composition functions as a metaphor for inner movement and experience.

A key source of reflection is nature — a primal system of rhythms and states that directly influences the psycho-emotional structure of the human being.

In my practice, I use abstract painting as a tool for the visual analysis of inner experience, focusing on the phenomenology of feeling and perception.

I perceive the painted surface as a stage where a dialogue unfolds between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious.

The image loses its function as a reflection and acquires the status of a statement — a form through which the subject articulates presence, absence, and inner duality.

In my recent projects, I turn to space as a symbol of desire, loss, and the impossibility of complete identification, drawing on the ideas of Jacques Lacan.

My abstract compositions are “in-between places”: organic forms dissolve, giving way to fluid structures of post-digital reality. These images create an illusion of recognition, yet they evade final interpretation.

I invite the viewer into an experience of encountering forms in a state of constant transformation — forms that simultaneously emerge and vanish, like subtle emotional states that resist rational comprehension.

This is painting in which the impossibility of fixation becomes a mode of existence.