- Main
- Artists' works
- Is the Wound Healing or Growing?
Shcherbyna Polina
“Wounds are suffering enclosed within a cycle of horror and hope, forcing one to wander in circles, unable to comprehend a distorted reality.”
The corporeality I depict sometimes resembles a human being, and at other times transforms into a generalized image of the body of humanity or the world. This body is often marked by damage. I return to the image of the Stigma from 2022, although its origins go back to my works from 2016. Back then, I depicted sores on the face or body — as a purely physical, anatomical phenomenon — yet deliberately treated them as sacred. This created a metaphysical aura and a dual perspective on contemporaneity. Later, the Stigma became established in my artistic language as an image of suffering trapped in a vicious circle of horror and hope.
Does the wound heal or expand?
On a man’s chest lies a hand with a deep wound, from which a barely visible sprout begins to grow. This is a motif I have been consistently returning to throughout my artistic practice — my personal provocation of reality toward transformation, toward the healing of the wound on the body of humanity. A deliberate, almost naive gesture against the backdrop of the harsh reality that surrounds us.
This image contains reflections on the nature of faith in times of turmoil — faith that is simultaneously a utopian illusion sustaining the world, soothing it with the thought that all pain will inevitably fade and all that is bad will one day end. In my work, I explore the paradox in which, on the one hand, the wound serves as literal evidence of wrongdoing — proof that the world constantly demands in order to believe in the authenticity of a victim’s suffering. On the other hand, it becomes a metaphor for pain one adapts to and even grows accustomed to when it lasts too long — throughout an individual life or even across entire generations.
Polina Shcherbyna lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. Born in Kyiv in 1993.
The artist’s practice is focused on the rethinking of painting. She reflects on its monumental origins, tracing the path from cave and wall paintings to the dome, from the individual icon to the unified sacred space. Her works reveal a dark yet poetic vision of suffering and hope, embodied in almost monochromatic images, pyrography, or carving. The central theme of her art, the core from which all subthemes emerge, is corporeality. Her works echo the collapse of the Anthropocene — a world where human dominance crumbles under the weight of political oppression and war, erasing both nature and humanity itself.
The artist creates paintings and installations with double-sided images on wood, using the techniques of burning and carving, as well as on canvas, where she applies self-made pigments based on ash combined with wax. Her installations sometimes include poetic sound as an additional element of spatial and auditory perception. One of her principal materials is unprimed linen canvas, fixed with layers of gelatin that preserve the creases, torn edges, and the passage of time in the form of folds and curves. The prototype of this technical method is the shroud. She creates images with a partial loss of information — this approach evokes the illusory nature of time, and memory becomes an imprint left by history.
She actively participates in projects and exhibitions in Europe, the USA, and Ukraine. In 2025, she presented her first solo museum exhibition in Germany, THE HIGHEST POINT OF THE EMPTY TEMPLE, at the Kebbel Villa, and was nominated for the Bourse Habib Sharifi scholarship for her installation Give The Chance On The Earth For Love To Overcome Death at the SNBA in Paris. In 2024, her works were featured in Byzantine nostalgia at Ujazdowski Castle CCA in Warsaw; the solo exhibition From Each Wound in One Day A Flower Will Grow at Gallery DIM, Warsaw; Traces of Timelessness at Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg; and A promise of tomorrow, curated by Nicola Petek at frontviews at HAUNT, Berlin.
The year 2023 included the solo show BREACH, Episode 2 at M17 Contemporary Art Centre, Kyiv; the solo exhibition LES ENFANTS VONT BIEN at Idealfruhstuck, Paris; the site-specific project Cycle of History for Et cetera pp at Begehungen Festival, Palais Lichtenstein, Germany; Women of Liberty at Salon Mondial, Basel; and an artist residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf-Fronberg, Germany. In 2022, she joined the residency Sorry no rooms available in Uzhhorod, Ukraine; took part in FIRE and HOPE at the NTK Gallery, Prague; and completed the K.A.I.R.-Košice international residency in Slovakia, where she created Tree of Great Height Standing in the Middle of the Earth for the exhibition Living according to Sky at Šopa Gallery.
