The MAK in Vienna is devoting a solo exhibition to Kateryna Lysovenko, winner of the 2025 Münze Österreich Price. Born in Ukraine, the artist studied at the Grekov Art College in Odesa and at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. She has lived in Austria since 2022. In large-scale paintings, murals, watercolours and texts, she examines what war does to bodies, language and belonging. Ghostly figures, animals and hybrid creatures populate her figurative images – a response to the rhetoric of wartime propaganda, which equates people with animals in order to justify violence. For Lysovenko, painting is a social act and a political medium: less an illustration of events than a method for exploring and questioning the world.
