Oksana Proshutya

Proshutya Oksana Vitaliyivna was born in Kiev, Ukraine on 10 th October 1980. Her work focuses on her inner contents and plots, situations, symbolisms, and metaphors. She loves to make people up. During her career, she engaged in a number of areas. She worked as an interior designer, an illustrator, a theatre and cinema stage designer, a tattoo artist, an exhibition curator, a storyboard artist, and a jewel creator using the minankari technique. After she gave birth to her three children, she did not have much time to pursue her artistic visions. That is when she started to draw quick sketches of nature and the like. She fell in love with this technique shortly after. At the same time, she came up with the idea of picturing the life of toys after children stop playing with them which resulted in the “No toys” series. When she works, she tries to balance her inner contents with the external human actions, situations, and scenes. She thinks that the artistic output helps to create an emotional bond between the artist and the spectator who contemplates over the artwork. She founded a fine art studio in 2019, where she teaches children to draw and perceive beauty around them. Just last year, she put a lot of time and effort into the improvisation theatre Black Square. She has loved theatre since she was a child and she uses the plastic language of drama for everything she cannot put on paper.

Education:

1991 – 1998 The National Secondary School of Arts of T. H. Shevchenko

1998 – 2004 National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (Book Graphics)

Work:

2002 – 2009 Interior designer and decorator of restaurants Trump Card (Deja Vu, Hinkali,

Kazbek, Tyubeteyka, Crepe de Shin, etc.)

2008  Assisting Director, the film Rejection

2009  Assisting Director, the TV film A House for Two

2013  Art Director, the short festival film In the Belly of the Wolf: Adventures of the Little Red

Riding Hood

2017  Solo artwork exhibition in Lokalita Gallery

2019  Illustrations for the documentary The Ukrainian Navy: A Hundred-Year-Long Tradition

2020  Solo exhibition in Ra Gallery, Kiev

2021  Group exhibition in the Kiev Art Gallery

2021 – 2022 Actress, the improvisation theatre Black Square

The Artist in Need residency was founded by Artivist Lab and created within the platform of the Academy of Fine Arts for Ukraine in collaboration with the Institute of Arts - Theatre Institute, Artivist Lab, MeetFactory and Artist at risk.

We consider it very important to support Ukrainian artists who are already in the Czech Republic but still cannot return home due to the upcoming war. After the experience of the first 3-month residency, we think that during the war, we cannot look at the residency only from a professional point of view, but we need to help our residents to settle down and maybe help them with their professional life in the new country.

The residency of Oksana Proshutya was supported by IDU.

Date of residency: 1. 4. 2022 – 30. 11. 2022