Unevenly Beautiful, 2025

Kateryna Kolesnykova  

In this work, a woman appears in a dense, dark aquatic space, surrounded by bright clownfish—symbols of imposed ideas about feminine “pleasantness," lightness, and decorativeness. The fish circle around her not as companions, but as voices of external expectations, as if whispering: “be nice," “be bright," “be simple." This pressure manifests itself on her body.
Distinct colored patches appear on the woman's skin—an artistic choice that transforms the body's pigment features into an element of the narrative. Here, they are not hidden or masked—on the contrary, they are emphasized boldly and openly. This is a gesture of reclaiming visibility and the right to be as one is. The patches do not blend with the patterns of the fish—they are of their own nature, not decorative, not “borrowed." They are markers of a unique physicality that exists beyond чужими сценаріями.
The woman's posture conveys a fragile tension: one hand touches her shoulder, as if protecting the space of her own body, while the other seems to try to peel away imposed roles. Her face is partially covered by the patches—as a sign that society often pays more attention to skin features than to the person who lives within it.
The background resembles an underwater chaos—strokes of turquoise, blue, and red create the impression of an environment where it is hard to breathe. It is a space of judgments, comparisons, advice, and comments that surround the woman as densely as water surrounds the body.
The painting speaks about the beauty of bodily diversity, about the right to visibility and the inviolability of women's skin, about resistance to soft yet persistent expectations to be “pleasant," “nice," “flawless." At the same time, it is about a quiet but powerful gesture of self-acceptance that grows even in the darkest depths.

Series Trained Femininity
The painting is shipped rolled (unstretched, without a frame).
The image size is 110×90 cm, while the canvas measures 118×99 cm to allow extra margins on each side for stretching.