Yuliya Vladkovska
Yuliya Vladkovska is a contemporary artist based in Bergamo, Italy, working across painting, sculpture and installation.
Her practice begins with ordinary objects, functional materials and everyday images that are familiar enough to be overlooked. Removed from their habitual contexts, they remain recognisable while becoming less stable in meaning and no longer fully determined by their original purpose.
Meaning is produced not within a single element but through the relations between them — through repetition, fragmentation, variation, rhythm, interval and spatial displacement. Autonomous parts form provisional structures that resist a fixed or final reading.
In painting, Vladkovska starts from small, familiar objects drawn from everyday life: beads, sweets, fragments of packaging, jewellery, food, personal accessories and other remnants of private experience. Enlarged and suspended within pale, open pictorial fields, they acquire an intensified presence while retaining their ordinary character. They suggest intimacy, desire, leisure, memory, celebration and aftermath, often implying a human presence precisely through its absence.
Rather than functioning as traditional still lifes, the paintings operate as partial scenes or suspended moments. The objects remain specific — things touched, consumed, worn, exchanged or left behind — while their relationships remain deliberately unresolved. Meaning emerges through association: between object and body, pleasure and absence, familiarity and estrangement.
In sculpture and installation, functional materials and objects are subjected to gestures of wrapping, opening, covering and repair. These actions create a tension between protection and restriction, preservation and transformation: repair can alter, and care can leave a permanent trace.
These gestures are informed by a family history shaped by several generations of doctors, in which medical acts of care, treatment and intervention formed part of everyday life. In the work, care is never neutral: every attempt to protect, repair or heal inevitably alters what it attempts to preserve.
Letters and partial signs recur throughout the practice as fragments rather than messages. Vladkovska is less interested in language as communication than in the unstable space between sign and meaning, where interpretation depends on proximity, rhythm, absence and relation.
Across the practice, familiar elements are displaced from certainty without becoming fully abstract. In painting, this instability is often emotional and associative; in sculpture and installation, it emerges through repetition, spatial relation and incomplete structures.
Originally trained in mathematics, she retains an interest in repetition, variation, interval and relational structures. Before dedicating herself fully to art, she held international roles in technology and business development at BMW and VMware.
She is completing an MFA in Painting (Biennio) at the Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara in Bergamo.
Her recent trajectory includes Il tempo e l’acqua at Fondazione Elpis in Milan, an artist-led laboratory conducted by Sabrina Mezzaqui and Claudia Losi, followed by a public presentation of its outcomes. Alongside her studio practice, Vladkovska founded VYNST, a private contemporary art space in Bergamo conceived as a platform for artistic research, exhibitions and encounters.
Her work has been exhibited in Italy and internationally and is held in private collections across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. It is also part of the permanent collection of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Luzzana, Italy. In 2026, Vladkovska was featured in Psychology Today (USA) in "The Best Ways to Begin Again," a feature on adult reinvention, learning, and identity change.
In The Studio
