Visual Artist | Teacher | Creative Muse and Strategic Producer
ARTIST BIO
Aliona Muravskaja is a multidisciplinary artist, international curator, creative director, and cultural strategist based in Finland. Originally from Lithuania, she has more than fifteen years of professional experience in visual arts, exhibition production, cultural management, education, and international creative collaboration.
She is the Co-Founder of Art Chaos – Nordic Curatorial Platform & Gallery, an international initiative dedicated to contemporary art, curatorial practice, and cross-cultural dialogue. Through exhibitions and collaborative projects, she works to create meaningful connections between artists, institutions, collectors, and audiences across countries.
Alongside her curatorial practice, painting forms the core of her artistic work. She explores colour, materiality, texture, and layered surfaces, creating paintings in which colour becomes structure and matter becomes a language of expression. Rather than seeking predictable harmony, she investigates unexpected relationships between colours, building compositions through dense textures, transparent layers, and contrasting materials.
Her artistic practice is inspired by the layered traditions of icon painting and the idea of light as something gradually revealed rather than simply depicted. These principles are reinterpreted through a contemporary visual language centred on material presence, colour, rhythm, and perception.
Committed to lifelong artistic research, Muravskaja continuously develops her practice through independent study, professional education, and interdisciplinary research in Lithuania and Finland. Her interests include iconography, somaesthetics, aesthetics, cultural heritage, materiality, and the relationship between painting and human perception.
Alongside her artistic and curatorial work, she is also the editor of ARTME, an online magazine for artists and creative professionals, supporting dialogue across contemporary art, culture, and creative practice.
Muravskaja believes that contemporary art has the power to create meaningful dialogue, strengthen cultural connections, and inspire personal transformation.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Painting is my way of thinking.
I work with colour, texture, and layered material, allowing each surface to evolve through accumulation rather than illustration. Every layer transforms the one beneath it, creating a dialogue between opacity and transparency, density and light, intuition and structure.
I am fascinated by unexpected colour relationships. By bringing together colours that appear incompatible, I search for a visual harmony that cannot be planned in advance. Colour is never decorative; it shapes rhythm, atmosphere, and emotional perception.
My study of iconography has deepened my understanding of painting as a process of revelation. I draw inspiration from its layered construction, where light gradually emerges from within the work rather than being applied to its surface. I reinterpret these principles through contemporary painting, focusing on colour, materiality, and presence.
As both an artist and curator, I believe that material carries meaning. My work explores how colour, texture, and light shape perception, inviting viewers to slow down, observe, and discover new relationships within the painted surface.
I work with matter that remembers light.
“Creating dialogue through colour, matter, and light.”
CURATOR NOTE
Written by Aliona Muravskaja
Curator & Co-Founder of Nordic Curatorial Platform & Gallery
Some artists are shaped by solitude.
Others are transformed by encounters.
Watching Jelena Murina this summer, I witnessed the latter.
For years, her creative energy had been directed outward—building projects, curating exhibitions, supporting other artists, and creating opportunities for artistic communities to grow. Painting never disappeared from her life, but it quietly stepped aside while she devoted herself to helping others find their own voices.
What I find most moving about this new body of work is that it was not born from isolation. It was born from dialogue.
Every meaningful encounter became part of the paintings. Not through imitation, but through an expanding way of seeing.
Conversations with experimental photographer Nikolay Zapolnov and my visual art teacher Andrej Denisenko gave her the confidence to return to the easel after a long silence. Painter Jevgenij Dranik opened a new sensitivity to the dialogue between black and blue and the visual relationship between what exists above and what unfolds below. Time spent in Valamo Monastery Icon Painting School (Finland) and Monastery of the Holy Spirit (Lithuania) together with the discipline of iconography, introduced another way of understanding gesture, stillness, and presence. Encounters with Viktoria Dragon and Master Victor added new perspectives on movement, material, colour, and optimism.
What fascinates me is that none of these influences appear as quotations.
Instead, they dissolve into a language that is unmistakably Jelena’s own.
Artists often speak about finding their voice.
Watching these paintings emerge, I found myself thinking about something different.
Perhaps artists also learn to speak through one another.
Just as we gradually absorb a spoken language by living among its speakers, we also absorb ways of seeing by living among artists. Without noticing the exact moment, another artist’s sensitivity to colour, light, rhythm, or silence quietly becomes part of our own perception.
These paintings are the result of that process.
They mark not the beginning of a new artistic identity, but the rediscovery of one that had been patiently waiting to return.
For me, this is the true meaning of AWAKENING.
Not a dramatic transformation, but the quiet moment when an artist remembers who she has always been.
