Elena Samarsky

I am a self-taught artist inspired by abstract expressionism. A Ukrainian-born Israeli, I have always been a creative person: I wrote poems and danced since my early childhood. However, I only started to paint much later in life, during my university studies. It was during the time when I had an opportunity to live in several different countries – Austria, Germany, UK – and painting abstract has helped me to cope and understand new contexts, to express my feelings about it and digest new experiences. In addition to being trained as a sociologist, during my PhD at the university of Oxford I had my first solo exhibition and started to focus more on my art and engage more actively with the art community. 

Since then, I have exhibited my works in the UK, Finland, and USA, and have been a finalist and winner of various juried exhibitions. I participated in several artistic residencies in Europe and the USA and in 2021, I co-authored a book with an American poet Timothy Tarkelly entitled “All Other Form of Expression: Paintings and Poems by Elena Samarsky and Timothy Tarkelly".