Ola Suprun

Artist Statement

Remembrance, generational continuity, and the search for one’s own place are the central concerns of Ola Suprun’s practice. She investigates how experience is transmitted across generations — from great-great-grandmothers through the women of her lineage to herself today — to be carried further through her own daughter. She examines behaviours, decisions, and habits that were not always made consciously, yet left their mark.

As an artist and archivist, she works with ancestral memory through painting, printmaking, and artist’s books. Her material is family photographs and letters, recorded interviews, recollections, and images of home: what has almost disappeared. In post-colonial Ukraine, these voices rarely survived long enough to reach any archive. For her, preserving ancestral memory is not nostalgia, but a foundation — something to hold onto in moments of fragility and uncertainty.

At the centre of her work is paradise — not as a place, but as a state: the moment when you know where you come from. When you recognise yourself in the face of a woman you have never met. Her works open a space for conversation about identity, belonging, and the right to know one’s own roots — at once personal and collective.

Biography

Born in Dubno, Volyn, into a family of Galician architects, Ola Suprun studied at the Department of Restoration at Lviv Polytechnic National University. For more than fifteen years she has practiced architecture and interior design.

She works with contemporary figurative painting and graphics — acrylic, oil, graphite, liner, and mixed media. Her architectural background shapes her sense of structure, scale, composition, and attention to place.

Her works have been exhibited in Dubno, Lviv, Ternopil, and Uzhhorod, and are held in private collections in Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Denmark.

Selected CV