Ukrainian artist Margarita Polovinko, whose drawings and photography excavated her post-Soviet reality and later, the Russian invasion, died at age 31 while serving as a combat medic. Her death was announced on April 8 by her sister, who wrote in an Instagram post, “Margarita died defending Ukraine.”
Margarita Polovinko was born on March 24, 1994, in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in central Ukraine, and the cultural peripherality of her time and place informed her early artistic preoccupations.
“My mother worked at the Kryvyi Rih steel plant all her life,” she told the Ukrainian online news outlet Suspilne Kultura in 2023. “When you’re a kid and you see people who go to work and don’t look positive, no profession attracts you. Unless it’s something that benefits society.” An athlete benched because of a bad heart, Polovinko instead went to art school.
“I am [interested in] the post-industrial city, post-industrial nature and the place of man in this environment,” she said in the interview. “This topic has taken various forms, but it seems unlikely that I will ever finish it.” Polovinko liked the areas that even in Kryvyi Rih existed out of sight: mines, quarries, and waste heaps, as well as the dispensaries addicts frequented. She made empathetic, near-automatic interpretations of these scenes in drawing and oil paintings. No one seemed happy, exactly, even in vivid colors, but they had dignity.
Her subjects shifted after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “In art, what was interesting for me was that I started drawing and realized that such primitive themes [like war] require primitive means,” she said. “Drawing is primitive not in the sense of “simple”, but in the sense that it just goes intuitively. This became a lifeline for me.” Using a black ballpoint pen, she drew dead children as angels; her friend, Daniil, who was killed in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, kicking Russians. When the invasion passed another year, her attention turned to the banality of evil, and she began drawing with her blood: “I’m not screaming for help through these drawings.”
In one work, Dream in Landing, a skeleton, depicted in thin black ink, offers a gun to a prone figure; the whole page is smeared with red.
“It’s just material that corresponds to the theme and feelings that the war evokes in me,” she said of the blood. “I started reading about various genocides and wars in the world, and it made me understand that something was wrong with the world, not with us, it made it easier to accept the war. But not what it brings: the deaths of people, animals, destruction.”
As of February 2025, Ukrainian officials have estimated that more than 45,000 Ukrainians have been killed and upwards of 400,000 have been wounded due to actions of the Russian military. The invasion has taken a steep toll on Ukraine’s arts and cultural landscape, with an estimated recovery cost of $9 billion, as well as the irreplaceable loss of monuments, museums, and artists. According to UNESCO, at least 668 sites, including 145 religious sites, 238 structures of “historical and/or artistic interest”, and 32 museums, had been damaged.
The Art Newspaper and Russian-language press has reported that Artur Snitkus, a Ukrainian artist and musician, died in combat near Donetsk in June of 2024, and the 18-year-old artist Veronika Kozhushko was killed in a Russian airstrike on Kharkiv that August. Early in the invasion, a trove of paintings by self-taught folk artist Maria Prymachenko, called “world-famous masterpieces” by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, burned in the bombing.
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