Biography

Hryhorii Zghurovets (b. 1995, Ukraine) is a figurative painter currently based in Budapest. Working primarily in acrylic on large-format canvas, he develops a visual language rooted in expressionist figuration, atmospheric abstraction, and symbolic restraint. His work spans portrait, landscape, and symbolic image - but always as statement, not as genre. His figures are never fully shown - identities obscured, mouths occupied, faces turned away or upward - in images that sit at the edge of recognition and refusal.

Born in Ukraine, Zghurovets has spent recent years in Budapest, where distance from home has sharpened rather than softened his relationship to the country at war. His practice draws on a decade of professional experience in visual design and branding - disciplines that inform the compositional precision beneath the expressive surface of his canvases. His influences include Adrian Ghenie, Francis Bacon, and Luc Tuymans: artists whose work he admires for its psychological intensity and deliberate obscuration of narrative clarity.

His debut painting series, Butterflies (Метелики, 2026), comprises six large-format works, each depicting a figure bound by what it cannot escape - barbed wire, ammunition belts, golden chains, cables, bandages, funeral ribbon. Across the series, butterflies of specific accent colors appear as the only free element, and the only constant reminder of what has been lost.

PAINTING MANIFESTO

I believe painting can hold what language refuses.
There are things that cannot be said in the current moment - not because they are secret, but because the language for them has been corrupted. Words like freedom, peace, heroism, democracy - these have been so thoroughly occupied by the machinery of power and propaganda that they have become useless. I do not trust them anymore.
So I paint.I paint the bandaged child who should be drawing suns. The prisoner counting days on a concrete wall. The man whose head is full of cables and whose mouth blows empty bubbles. The soldier who has learned to carry a bullet between his teeth like a cigarette. The politician who wears his corruption like jewelry, smiling with oil on his teeth. The mother whose open hand holds nothing.

These are not allegories. These are portraits of real conditions. The figures in my paintings are not named because they do not need to be - you know them. You have seen them. You may be one of them.
The butterfly is the only thing in these paintings that moves freely. I put it there on purpose. Even in the most closed image, something escapes. I am interested in that thing - what it is, where it goes, whether it can return.I am a Ukrainian artist living outside my country during a war. I am not a war painter in the traditional sense - I do not paint battlefields or weaponry or destruction. I paint what war makes of people who were just trying to live. I paint the interior of a conflict that has no clean edges and no clear ending.I work because I do not know what else to do. And because I believe that if you look at a painting long enough, it looks back.

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