MARIA ASANOVA
MARIA ASANOVA
INFO & CONTATTI
mariiaasanova@gmail.com
+41 76 535 07 97
PAINTER
CURRICULUM VITAE
Ukrainian visual artist
Born 1995, Evpatoria, Crimea
Based in Saint-Saphorin, Vaud, Switzerland
Maria Asanova is a Ukrainian visual artist whose large-scale paintings explore the emotional power of color, texture, and form.
Born in Evpatoria, Crimea, in 1995, she studied art from 2008 to 2013 at the Evpatoria Art School, graduating with honors. In 2014, she moved to Kharkiv, where she completed an honors degree at the Kharkiv College of Textile and Design in 2018.
A pivotal encounter during her studies was with Galina Fedorovna, whose mentorship helped Maria refine her technique and cultivate her creative voice.
In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Maria was forced to leave her country. After a brief period in Spain, she settled in Switzerland and currently lives and works in the village of Saint-Saphorin, in the canton of Vaud.
Maria’s work has been recognized internationally. In 2024, she was awarded the Masterful Minds Award in the Artist of the Year Award 2024, organized by Circle Foundation for the Arts (France), and won Second Place at the HelvetArt August Art Competition with her painting Diptyque II, exhibited at the Geneva Hilton. Earlier in her career, she was also a winner of the IX All-Ukrainian Festival of Young Artists in Kyiv.
Her paintings have been exhibited in Ukraine, France, and Switzerland. Notable recent exhibitions include a solo show at Taberna Viva (Geneva, 2025), the prestigious Slava Ukraini group exhibition at Espace des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque in Paris (2024), where she exhibited seven large canvases as the sole painter among the selected artists, a solo exhibition at Café Brew in Vevey (2023), and collective exhibitions with Espace Artistes Femmes in Lausanne, including the group show at the École Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) in 2023 and the EAF & De Cerenville Géotechnique exhibition in Lausanne (2024–2025).
In 2023, she collaborated with composer Matteo Riparbelli for the world premiere of Diptyque, creating two large-scale paintings visually expressing the images evoked by the music composed for Guitar and orchestra that were exhibited in the concert hall during the XIV Festival International de Guitare de Versoix.
Maria is a member of the Espace Artistes Femmes collective and continues to develop her practice in Switzerland while participating in international projects.
“Art does not tolerate clear bounderies or rigid patterns; it grows from an idea that a person brings to life”
M. Asanova
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I am a Ukrainian painter, born in Crimea in 1995, and currently based in Saint-Saphorin, Switzerland. My artistic path has been shaped by a forced exile that led me to leave my home in Kharkiv in 2022. Displacement, memory, and identity are central to my work; not as direct representations of loss, but as emotional landscapes born from the experience of uprooting.
Rather than depicting conflict, my paintings translate inner turbulence into vibrant compositions. I use abstraction, bold colors, and symbolic forms to explore resilience and the fragmented yet persistent connection to one’s origins.
Recurring elements such as flowers, pixel-like shapes, or elusive figures evoke the fragile yet vital traces of memory. Nature and childhood memories become vessels of beauty and survival—anchors in a reality that feels both suspended and in motion.
Through my work, I strive to offer moments of stillness, light, and emotional truth—whispers of hope, even in exile.