Creative path through graphic design to abstract painting.
Natalia Ostapenko (b. 1990, Ukraine) is a visual artist based in Lille, France.
She has developed a highly refined and graphic, abstract style, which creates kaleidoscopic, geometric compositions with carefully honed, evocative colour palettes. This rigorously executed approach draws on her past experience as a designer as well as making reference to historic painting movements such as the flattened nature of Cubist still lifes, expressive colour field painting and the intense luminosity of Impressionist landscapes. Her non-representational works hold strong associations with our visual experience of the world, for example, emulating the experience of changing light at dawn or the happy patchwork of intense summer colours in natural landscapes. Her work also references decorative applied and folk arts such as patchwork, marquetry and set painting, in its use of pattern, which Ostapenko gained knowledge about during her early studies. Ideas of collage are important in her work with some being reminiscent of cut-paper modernist works and others having a layered appearance, which creates depth. She plays with both symmetry and variation within her compositions. Her main materials are acrylic on canvas and each work is thoroughly researched and sketched in advance. Ostapenko has integrated airbrushing into her process, using it as a way to make subtle colour mixes and gradations but also to add narrative, for example, within Memories, 2021, a semi-opaque layer partly obscures the right hand side of the canvas, revealing the linear process of both the making of the painting and of memory.
Ostapenko graduated with a Master of Arts from National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. Before moving to France she exhibited regularly in Ukraine and had two solo exhibitions in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her work is held within private collections in the US, UK, Singapore, Denmark, Germany, France, Georgia and Ukraine.
Recently she has participated in a group exhibition within Monat Gallery in Madrid and exhibited her works at the Paris Art Fair (Paris Expo art3f).
A renowned art platform Artfinder included her in ‘’Ones to Watch in 2022’’, she became one of the 16 artists chosen annually by a respected curatorial team.
Among recent publications Natalia had articles in such magazines as Vanity Fair UK, Divide (Canada), Artmajeur (France), Bluebee (UK), Al-Tiba9 (Barcelona, Spain).