iMAK – Museum of Applied ArtsInnere Stadt
KATERYNA LYSOVENKO: Borderland
This exhibition has ended.
Ukrainian painter Kateryna Lysovenko, winner of the 2025 Münze Österreich Prize, treats painting as political action, using reduction and absence to counter propaganda.
Museum websiteMore in Vienna
You meet the first figure before the paintings: a woman in a thinking pose on the entrance stairs, pink spines growing out of her back. Inside, in Still Hour (2025), people wrapped in sleeping bags lie like mummies in a shimmering forest, a picture the MAK presents as a kind of memorial.
Lysovenko trained in Odesa and Kyiv and has lived in Austria since 2022; the show marks her 2025 Münze Österreich Prize. The darker oils deal with war and exile, the watercolours are paler. New paintings made for the MAK follow the Dnipro through Kyiv and the Danube through Vienna, two rivers that both end in the Black Sea. A family portrait in blue, yellow, pink and orange links the show's two halves.
MAK director Lilli Hollein told ORF the work "gets under your skin". It is one artist in the MAK Forum, and it closes on Sunday 18 October.
Look for
Still Hour (2025)
Look for figures wrapped in sleeping bags, crouched like cocoons in a menacing, shimmering forest, which the MAK presents as a kind of memorial.
Home came at you (2024)
A woman sits at a table while the room around her dissolves into clouds and smoke, the kitchen turning into a war scene.
The Portrait of the artist's Family (2026)
The family painted in blue, yellow, pink and orange, hung as the bridge between the show's two halves.
The river paintings
Beautiful Kyiv on the Dnipro, Beautiful Vienna on the Danube and Odesa's Black Sea, made for this show, with rivers running through them like veins and borders.
The figure on the stairs
A woman in a thinking pose with pink spines sticking out of her back waits on the entrance stairs.
Good for
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You want a light visit: the paintings deal with war and exile.
Also at MAK – Museum of Applied Arts
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Image credits
8
- MAK – Museum of Applied ArtsGugerell / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
- tierisch menschlichGraciela Iturbide, Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1979. Dom Museum Wien, Otto Mauer Contemporary, Courtesy of the artist, Foto: L. Deinhardstein.
- A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew - Eran ShakineCourtesy of Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)
- The Special Case of Steffy Goldner: The New York Philharmonic's First WomanCourtesy of Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)
- Dom Museum WienBauer Alfons / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Haus der MusikClemens Pfeiffer, Wikimedia Commons
- Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdisches Museum Wien)Sonja Bachmayer / Jewish Museum Vienna, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Kunst Haus Wien – Museum HundertwasserC.Stadler/Bwag, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0