Oleksii Shcherbak is a Ukrainian-born, Paris-based artist whose practice primarily explores painting and drawing. His work creates poetic, otherworldly visions populated by sentimental and mythical characters who seem to inhabit spaces suspended between reality, memory, and imagination.
His creative process is rooted in a form of process-driven figuration, where the act of making plays an essential role in the development of the image. Through an intuitive and exploratory approach, Shcherbak creates figures that can be understood as cosmic exiles—beings navigating strange and ambiguous emotional landscapes shaped by feelings of isolation, nostalgia, displacement, and discovery. His characters appear detached from any specific time or place, becoming vessels through which intimate and universal experiences can be explored.
A central aspect of Shcherbak’s practice is his rethinking of traditional portraiture. Rather than simply depicting physical identity, he uses the figure as a psychological and symbolic space. His paintings and drawings explore memory, nostalgia, and the surreal contradictions of time and identity, creating images in which the familiar coexists with the fantastical.
The atmosphere of his work is often melancholic, mysterious, and dreamlike. Characters, settings, and compositions appear to emerge from fragmented memories or parallel worlds, where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fiction, are deliberately blurred.
Working from Paris, Shcherbak develops a contemporary figurative practice in which the human figure becomes a means of addressing questions of belonging, displacement, memory, and transformation. His visual language combines intimate and mythical elements to construct a distinctive universe that feels both deeply personal and universally evocative.
