Blooming Within, 2026

Olha Riabokon  

This artwork is shipped rolled in a protective tube (unstretched) for safe international delivery. The canvas includes an additional 2 inches (5 cm) of material on each side for professional stretching on a wooden frame. The dimensions stated in the listing refer to the final size of the artwork after stretching.

Blooming Within
Sometimes, we need to set aside everything happening around us for a little while, just to hear what's happening within.
We get so easily swept up in other people's expectations, worries, conversations, and the endless rush of everyday life that we forget about what matters most — our own inner world. And yet, that's exactly where we can find the things that restore us: quiet, beauty, pleasure, and the little things that nourish us in a way only we truly understand.
It's not about escaping the world. It's more about finding our way back to ourselves.
Sometimes, to bloom on the outside again, we first need a little time to simply be within.

Series: 'Her Wild Garden'

This series brings together vivid, surreal and intimate paintings in which a recurring female figure finds herself in a slightly strange, almost fairy-tale world. Drawing on personal memories and experiences of attraction, as well as the sometimes absurd dynamics between women and men, the works transform fragments of lived experience into imagined scenes. 
Pink spaces, flowers, animals and fantastical landscapes create a sense of lightness and an almost naïve beauty. Yet beneath this sweetness, something more ambiguous gradually emerges. The women in these paintings are sensual, yet their presence is not reduced to mere objects of desire. They exist in their own space, playing, watching, hiding, seducing, getting bored, laughing and simply inhabiting their own lives. 
‘I am interested in placing visual attractiveness alongside what usually remains beyond its surface’. Cute animals, decorative elements, pastel tones and floral aesthetics coexist with themes of desire, loneliness, self-perception, power and how women are perceived through their sexuality. This tension between outward innocence and inner ambiguity enables me to address serious issues in an indirect manner. 
Autobiographical fragments provide the basis for real events to transform into imagined situations, characters, and spaces. ‘I want to give viewers room to find something of their own within the work — a memory, a desire, a private joke, a familiar situation, or simply a feeling’.