Kate
Konovka

Biography

Kate Konovka grew up beside the Black Sea, in a small town east of Odessa where summer light arrives low and stays amber for hours. She studied painting in Odessa and spent her twenties making work concerned less with the coast itself than with the quality of attention the coast demands — the discipline of looking at something ordinary for long enough that it stops being ordinary.

The war that reached her region in 2022 interrupted everything. She left with one bag and a portfolio, moved west through several countries, and eventually found herself in Delmenhorst — a quiet post-industrial town near Bremen in northern Germany. She found a studio there: north-facing windows, high ceilings, the particular silence of a city that has no self-image to maintain. She has been working there since.

Travel has always been part of her practice, but not the kind that ends in galleries or art fairs. Kate is drawn to places where landscape refuses to be decorative: Iceland in January when daylight never fully arrives; the volcanic interior of Madeira after a week of Atlantic rain; the Saharan fringe of Morocco; the coast of East Africa, where she spent a month learning that colour does not behave the way European painters assume it does. She returns from these trips with no photographs — only memory, and the productive disorientation of having seen something that does not fit any existing category.

Her current work is made primarily in oil on linen: slow, transparent layers built up over weeks, then scraped back until the surface holds something that could not have been planned. When she works on paper — in watercolor or walnut ink — she observes the opposite discipline: one sitting, no revision, complete trust in the material. The two bodies of work are, she says, in permanent conversation with each other.