ARTIST STATEMENT

My work begins where order meets its own limit.

I treat colour as a material in its own right — something with weight, structure and position, not a finish applied at the end. I build it the way one builds a wall or balances a figure on a stone: element by element, volume against volume, until it holds, or begins to strain.

My language comes from op art, a tradition I also study as a researcher. But I am less interested in the optical effect than in what it reveals: how a structure holds what it carries, and at what cost. Each series approaches this question from a different side — the unconscious routes of thought in Highway of the Unconscious; rupture in Invasion, begun before Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine and continued after it; the weight between a body and its support in Body and Ground.

BIOGRAPHY

Nazar Symotiuk is a Ukrainian sculptor based in Lviv for whom colour is as sculptural as form. His wall-based works, assembled from thousands of modular elements, build colour physically rather than painting it, so that it shifts as the viewer moves; his recent freestanding figures carry the same structural concerns into the round.

A Senior Lecturer at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, he is completing a PhD there on how Ukrainian artists have interpreted op art since the mid-twentieth century — research that directly informs his practice.

His work has been shown at NordArt in Germany, where he was a prize finalist, and at Mees-Van De Wiele Galerie in Ghent, and is held in private collections across Europe, Japan and the United States.

    SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

    • "Limits of the Visible", White World gallery, Kyiv, (2026)

    • "Ratio", Solo Exhibition, Mercury Art Center, Lviv, Ukraine, 2025
    • Art Budapest Market, Budapest, Hungary, 2025
    • Mees-Van De Wiele Galerie, Ghent, Belgium, 2023
    • NordArt, International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Budelsdorf, Germany, 2021
    • Kyiv Art Week, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019
    • "De:Forma", Solo Exhibition, Lviv National Philharmonic, Lviv, Ukraine, 2018
    • "5.ART" Project, Forum Lviv, Ukraine, 2017
    • Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, Lviv, Ukraine, 2017

    SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

    • Optical Art in Contemporary Wood Plastic — Visnyk of Lviv National Academy of Arts
    • Conceptual and Perceptual Aspects of Op-Art — Lviv National Academy of Arts Research Publication

    EDUCATION

    • PhD Candidate, Decorative Art & Art Restoration — Lviv National Academy of Arts
    • MFA, Department of Wood Art — Lviv National Academy of Arts
    • BFA, Department of Wood Art — Lviv National Academy of Arts