4th July 2025
Lesia Vasylchenko Wins Main Award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025
Kateryna Aliinyk and Yevhen Korshunov are awarded special prizes. Yevhen Korshunov takes the public choice prize
Lesia Vasylchenko is the main prize winner of the 8th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, a nationwide prize for Ukrainian artists aged 35 or younger.
Lesia Vasylchenko is the main prize winner of the 8th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, a nationwide prize for Ukrainian artists aged 35 or younger. Vasylchenko was awarded 400,000 UAH (about $10,000) and will automatically be shortlisted for the next edition of the Future Generation Art Prize—a worldwide contemporary art prize. During the award ceremony, the artist announced that she would donate the entire prize sum to charitable contributions in support of the army.
Kateryna Aliinyk received the first Special prize for her work, and Yevhen Korshunov won the second Special prize as well as the Public Prize Award. In addition to 100,000 UAH ($2,400), the winners will also receive financial support for internships, further education, residences or new production.
While introducing Lesia Vasylchenko, winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025, the jury stated:
“The jury awards the main prize to Lesia Vasylchenko for a physically impressive while poetic work that elegantly creates a study of the Ukrainian sky—a symbol that in this realization becomes simultaneously a space of longing, trauma and hope.
The sky—once a space of freedom—becomes a backdrop for disasters, but also a space of memory and contemplation. With poetic editing and a sense of rhythm, the artist tells of a world that is changing before our eyes from 1918 till this very day—not through violent images, but through their absence, through silence, through light and shadow.
The work subtly raises urgent questions about authorship, futurity, and the algorithmic construction of historical narrative. The jury was particularly impressed by the installation’s conceptual rigour, technological sophistication, and deep emotional resonance, offering a contemplative yet urgent response to historical rupture, one that bridges intimacy with scale, and the human with the planetary.”
Commenting on the work by first special prize winner Kateryna Aliinyk, the jury said:
“Kateryna Aliinyk is awarded the first Special Prize for her work that is a moving emotional record in which painting becomes a tool of memory, mourning and resistance. The artist, born in Luhansk, addresses the loss of her home as an unattainable landscape charged with an eerie intimacy—wild boars, dense clouds, insects and rustling tree roots—each scene rendered with such precision and quiet unease that the viewer feels like an uninvited witness.
In creating a visual language for tenderness under duress, Aliinyk offers a quietly radical proposition: that even in the most volatile environments, the search for connection remains.”
Awarding Yevhen Korshunov, the second special prize, the jury said:
“Yevhen Korshunov is awarded the second Special prize for a work that is a unique record of everyday wartime life seen from the inside. His drawings and anecdotes render the anonymous figure of the soldier visible, individual, and human. They reveal, through a male gaze, a tenderness expressing quiet gestures of care under duress of a military training—and on the quiet, vital space art can inhabit, in the shadow of war.
The jury is humbled by his ability to create and remain an artist while being a soldier. Describing honestly and filled with humour, humanity under straining conditions. His work embodies the transition of men, their bodies, their goals and functions.”
This year, a special recognition outside the competition was dedicated to the memory of Veronika Kozhushko — a young artist from Kharkiv who applied for the Prize but tragically died on 30 August 2024 as a result of a Russian missile strike targeting residential areas and public spaces in Kharkiv.
The members of the selection committee in 2025 were:
Partner Platforms representing different regions of Ukraine supported the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025:
Exhibition of 20 Shortlisted Artists for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025