Pride and Prejudice, 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.

Pride and Prejudice

We are often so quick to form opinions about things we have barely had the chance to understand. Sometimes, all it takes is a single glance, one detail, one thing that doesn’t fit the picture we’re used to — and the story has already been written for us.

Pride prefers to keep its distance from anything that might shake its certainty. Prejudice doesn’t even need proof — it is content with what everyone has been taught to believe.

But there is always something beyond what another person’s gaze can see.

Perhaps the most interesting part begins precisely where the first impression ends.

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’.