Maps of Happiness, 2024

Viktoria Ganhao   Emerging artists

Viktoria Ganhao believes that life is never static, and neither is painting.

Born in Kyiv and now based in Portugal, she has lived across cultures, embraced new beginnings, and ultimately found her truest language in abstraction. Her paintings reflect this journey: layered, intuitive, and full of movement, they explore what happens when memory, emotion, and experience converge.

Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Viktoria creates luminous fields of colour that evolve through multiple layers of gesture, texture, and transparency. Each painting becomes a visual map of transformation—a record not of places themselves, but of the traces they leave behind. Moments, encounters, landscapes, and emotions are distilled into abstract compositions that invite viewers to navigate their own connections and interpretations.

Rather than offering fixed narratives, her work remains open and alive, revealing new relationships and meanings over time. Her paintings bring together energy and contemplation, creating spaces that continue to unfold with each viewing.

Today, her work is held in private and public collections across Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia, including the permanent collection of the Guarda Museum in Portugal, reflecting an ongoing dialogue between the paintings and those who choose to live with them.