Marharyta Polovinko, 31-year-old Ukrainian artist, killed on frontline – The Art Newspaper
Marharyta Polovinko, a 31-year-old Ukrainian artist who volunteered to evacuate wounded soldiers from the frontline then joined the fight herself, died on 5 April, her battalion reported, underscoring the human and cultural toll of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Smart, hardworking, motivated. A true warrior,” the drone unit of her 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 3rd Motorized Rifle Brigade posted on its Instagram page alongside a photograph of Polovinko smiling amidst snow-covered ruins, wearing camouflage with a rifle draped on her shoulder. “Died while performing a combat mission. With dignity. With a weapon in her hands.”
Polovinko was buried on 11 April in the Alley of Heroes of the central cemetery in her hometown, Kryvyi Rih, where she was born in 1994. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also born in the city in central Ukraine. A Russian missile strike near a playground in Kryvyi Rih on 4 April killed up to 20 people, among them nine children.
On 15 April, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was blocking a G7 joint statement condemning Russia’s Palm Sunday strike on Sumy, a Ukrainian city near the Russian border, that killed 35 people and damaged the Nikanor Onatsky Regional Art Museum, the Sumy Regional Museum of Local History, and other cultural institutions, the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications reported.
The bleak post-Soviet landscape of Kryvyi Rih, which is known for ore extraction, had been a focus of Polovinko’s art. Her mother worked at the city’s steel plant. Polovinko studied fine arts at the Dnipro Theater and Art College, then graduated in 2019 from the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture (NAOMA) in Kyiv.
War cast the city in a new light, reflected in the themes of Polovinko’s pencil drawings, which included the deaths of children in Irpin, a city near Kyiv brutally targeted by Russian forces in the early days of the full-scale invasion. Then, she told the Ukrainian culture TV channel Suspilne Kultura in a 2023 interview she began to create works with her own blood, her way of processing panic attacks that intensified with the war.
In her artist statement for Secondary Archive, a platform for feminist discourse by women artists from Central and Eastern Europe sponsored by Poland’s Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, composed with the art historian and curator Alya Segal, Polovinko wrote: “With a pencil, I simply illustrated the primal fear. When the rethinking came, the understanding of reality became deeper, and the “monsters” disappeared. That’s when the material of blood appeared. It was necessary to extract the material not from the surface, as it was with the pencil, but from the depth.”
Polovinko explained the centrality of Kryvyi Rih to her work. “My native Kryvyi Rih is surrounded by quarries for ore extraction, my house is located right next to one of them. Due to the ore, everything there has a red tint, and after the rain, the roads become red. Ore is like the blood of the earth, the same iron. I associate these quarries with the wounds of the earth created by people. I feel Kryvyi Rih as something absolutely constant and immovable, but it played a big role for me in understanding the war.”
She sold her artworks to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Other Ukrainian contemporary artists killed in the war in the past year on the frontline and as civilians, include Artur Snitkus and Veronika Kozhushko.
Earlier this month, Euromaiden Press, which chronicles events in Ukraine for an international audience, recorded Polovinko’s death as the “latest casualty” of Russia’s “cultural massacre” of Ukraine.
“Since February 2022, Russia has systematically targeted Ukrainian cultural voices — through assassinations, bombings, and combat — leaving more than 100 cultural figures dead in its wake,” Euromaidan writes. “Their stories offer a window into a broader catastrophe — how Russia’s war is methodically extinguishing creative potential, turning once-promising talents into voids before their greatest works can be created.”
Nikita Kadan, one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary artists and curators, wrote in an Instagram tribute featuring photographs of a number of Polovinko’s works at an exhibition in Lviv along with a poem by Sylvia Plath, that she will be remembered as “part of the history of art, the history of Ukraine, the universal history of dignity and light.”
