Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Anastasiya Savran (b. 1997, Lviv, Ukraine) works in a mode of abstraction that trusts colour and gesture to do the narrating. Across this selection of paintings and works on paper — spanning acrylic, pastel, ink and watercolour pencil on canvas, wood, board and paper — a consistent sensibility emerges: dense, layered fields of colour that resist settling, punctuated by half-legible silhouettes that surface and dissolve almost as soon as they are noticed.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | Sky Dispute | 2023
The strongest works here are the ones that commit fully to atmosphere. Sky Dispute and Bark, muted sit in a register of bruised plum, ochre and forest green, built up in dry, dragged strokes that read almost like weathered wood grain — appropriate, given the latter’s title. These pieces have real physical presence: the surface itself seems to be doing the work of describing depth, rather than any drawn form within it.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | Bark, Muted | 2025
Rain and Might pushes this further into pure gesture, its diagonal streaks of turquoise, magenta and violet generating genuine kinetic force; it is the most confident and least hesitant piece in the group, and arguably the closest Savran comes here to letting mark-making carry the entire composition without needing a referent behind it.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | Rain and Might | 2021
Elsewhere, the recurring motif of a human silhouette dissolving into vertical hanging forms — most explicit in I climb and long for and The Giver — is the show’s clearest conceptual thread, and its most uneven execution.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | I Climb and Long For | 2024
In The Giver the figure is rendered with enough structural clarity (the raised arms fusing into willow branches, the warm ochre body against cool violet-blue ground) that the metaphor of merging with landscape reads immediately and effectively. In I climb and long for, however, the same idea is worked in a looser, more diagrammatic pastel line that leaves the figure feeling under-resolved next to the confident colour fields around it — the drawing has not yet caught up to the ambition of the concept.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | The Giver | 2023
The Iceland-inspired canvases (Counting, Liquid Tongue) are cooler and more controlled, built from close-value blues and greens with small, repeated circular marks that read as flora, snowmelt, or something more abstract depending on how long one looks.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | Counting | 2025
This restraint is consistent with Savran’s stated interest in violet as a link between the natural and the mystical, though in this pairing the palette sometimes veers toward decorative uniformity—Liquid Language, in particular, with its blue-blue patches, would have benefited from a stronger structural support, so that the field would not be perceived as mere texture, but as a considered composition.
Anastasiya Maria Savran | Liquid Tongue | 2024
Taken together, the body of work is at its best when the paint handling itself carries the emotional charge — thick, gestural, physically varied — and slightly less convincing when a linear figure is asked to do interpretive work the surrounding colour has already done more persuasively. Savran’s instinct for saturated, harmonically tense colour relationships is genuine and well developed; the next step for this practice may be trusting that instinct even further, and integrating figure and field so that neither element needs to explain the other.
