Kateryna Sopielkina was born in Dnipro, Ukraine, into a third-generation family of artists. She earned her diploma in Painting from the Dnipro Theatre and Art College and specialized in printmaking at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv. When the 2022 invasion interrupted her studies and disrupted her life, her practice transformed through a path of displacement that first took her to Switzerland and then to Rome, where she graduated from the Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA), completing an educational journey spanning both the Kyiv Academy (NAFA) and the Roman institution.
Her research is an exploration of the geography of the invisible: a mapping of psychological and emotional landscapes that exist beneath physical reality. She investigates fleeting moments in which memory, scent, and light dissolve the distance between past and present, using art as a means of accessing the depths of the human spirit. Following the invasion of her homeland, her work has turned toward the inner landscape as a place of refuge, where the intangible becomes more essential to survival than the material. As a refugee, she inhabits a condition of permanent temporality and, through the integration of real-time data and reclaimed war materials, seeks to collapse the distance between the viewer and the front line. Her work is no longer only an attempt to make the invisible visible; it is the effort to build a future, even when it must emerge from the cold and toxic ruins of the present.
