Inherited Resilience is a solo show featuring the ever-evolving and deeply affecting works of Ukrainian artist Ola Rondiak. The work featured in this exhibition occupies a charged space between painting and design, where formal clarity collides with lived urgency. Drawing on imagery rooted in the everyday rhythms of Ukrainian life during war, her compositions render scenes of femininity, ancestry, and cultural tradition with a deliberate sense of normalcy—one that is destabilized by the omnipresence of war. This tension between the familiar and the fractured becomes a central structuring force in her practice.

This synthesis is powerfully articulated in The Letter (2025), an abstracted female soldier stands at the front lines of some battle, a highly detailed rendering of a gun clutched in her hands. The figure of a Motanka, a talisman representing luck and protection, looms behind the soldier; a steady backbrace of support against the conflict before her. The Motanka is a manifestation of the encouraging words of her mother's letter, written above her shoulders, that aid the soldier in her resolve through ancestry, culture, and maternal bonds.

Rondiak’s visual language asserts cultural pride not as nostalgia, but as resistance. Ukrainian identity emerges through pattern, gesture, and iconography, while war-torn fear permeates the surface, disrupting any illusion of distance or abstraction. Importantly, her work resists gendered narratives of conflict: women are presented not as symbols, but as equally vulnerable participants in a shared reality of survival. Through this synthesis of design sensibility and painterly expression, Rondiak articulates a collective experience shaped by endurance, visibility, and the insistence on everyday life amid ongoing violence.

- Curated by Phoebe Caswell