About the Artist
Katia Lesiuk
Los Angeles, CA
Katia Lesiuk paints the way she works: with momentum, color, and an instinct for what draws the eye. Proudly Ukrainian and based in Los Angeles and New York, she came to painting through a career built on staging other people's creative work — years spent coordinating marketing campaigns for luxury fashion and jewelry brands, then setting up exhibitions and art events for Contemporary Abstract artists internationally. Somewhere in that whirl of campaigns and openings, painting became her own outlet rather than just her profession. It shows in the work. Her canvases are built from saturated, unapologetic color — teal against coral, gold leaf catching light next to a wash of violet — layered with the kind of textured, gestural mark-making that rewards standing close: impasto roses, drifts of glitter, ribbons of metallic paint pulled through in a single confident stroke. There's a sense of celebration in it, an urban energy that feels at home in a gallery as much as it would in the kind of glamorous spaces she's spent her career curating. Katia describes herself as an urban visionary, and her paintings read that way — abstract, maximalist, unafraid of embellishment, built for a life lived at the center of things.
“Katia Lesiuk paints in bold color and texture — gestural abstractions built from impasto, metallic leaf, and an unmistakable sense of celebration.”
Artist Statement
Medium
Acrylic Paint, Mixed Media Art
Style
Abstract Expressionism, Contemporary
Languages
English
Process
In the Studio
The Painting Process Katia Lesiuk paints in layers and in motion, building her canvases the way she builds a campaign — with an instinct for what will catch the eye first, and what will keep it there. She works primarily in acrylic, but rarely stops at paint alone: metallic leaf, glitter, and heavy-bodied texture medium all find their way into the surface, applied with a palette knife as often as a brush so that color arrives with real physical weight. Her process tends to move fast and gesturally in its early stages — broad fields of color laid down in sweeping, confident strokes that set the emotional register of the piece before any detail exists. From there, she works back in with more deliberate, sculptural passes: the impasto roses and swirled forms that recur across her work are built up stroke by stroke, each twist of the knife left visible rather than smoothed away. Metallic accents and glitter go in last, placed with a curator's eye for where the light needs to land. The paintings that come out of this process carry both halves of Katia's life in the art world — the spontaneity of someone painting for herself, and the polish of someone who has spent years thinking about how work is presented and seen.
