The Naked Room opens the doors to its new space at 2a Zolotovoritska Street. We set out to make it barrier-free. Kyiv remains a city with critically low levels of accessibility, while the number of galleries equipped to accommodate people with different needs—including our previous space on Reitarska Street—is close to zero. We want to help change this situation by setting an example ourselves. Creating an accessible space required significant additional resources, and we are grateful to our partner, platform company Kiss My Apps, for supporting the renovation. For Kiss My Apps, this decision is a natural continuation of its focus on charitable initiatives. The company believes that accessibility is a necessary condition for a contemporary Ukrainian society, and that supporting cultural development even during wartime helps shape the country's future.
“Our move from Reitarska was forced upon us. Despite the serious deterioration of the city's security and economic situation, rents on the street that had become a symbol of the new creative Kyiv continued to rise relentlessly. We therefore had to give way to more commercially viable projects, which, at the time, felt like the death of the gallery. Instead, we were able to find a larger space, literally 100 metres from our previous one, with the possibility of adapting it for people with different access needs—something I believe is a basic necessity today.
In the gallery's programme, we want to retain our original focus: presenting exceptional artistic practices through focused solo exhibitions. As at the beginning of our work, women artists make up the majority of next year's programme. But now for entirely different reasons. At the same time, although many artists close to us are serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces or working in the defence industry, and often lack sufficient time and resources for artistic expression, we want to explore other ways of working with and involving them,” says Maria Lanko.
Refreshments will be provided by our new partners, the bar and bookshop Knyzhky i Pliashky, who are opening a corner at The Naked Room.
The Naked Room opens with Anthology, a solo exhibition by Karina Synytsia. In recent years, the artist has increasingly turned to mural painting. The exhibition, however, presents her paintings and works on paper created in 2024–2025. In these works, Synytsia turns to landscapes—urban or natural—and architecture, using them as a symbolic stage for reflecting on changes to the environment during the war, the experience of displacement, and stories of relationships between people and the spaces around them. The artist often works with vernacular architecture—typical buildings and everyday urban structures.
The exhibition focuses on urban landscapes depicted primarily in Kharkiv, Dnipro and Kyiv: their streets and courtyards, and observations of how nature exists among apartment blocks or between neighbourhoods. Most of the works were made in Kharkiv, where the series largely took shape—as a way of closely observing the surrounding environment, with numerous references to the Saltivka district and Kharkiv's springs.
The artist seeks to capture a sense of fragility that borders on stability and strength: in the structures depicted, in the growth of plants, and in the contrast between the barrenness of the soil and, conversely, its fertility. In the works presented in the exhibition, we see flowerbeds and holes made for seeds, and as viewers, we cannot tell whether they are craters or newly prepared planting spots. They balance between emergence and damage, leaving the boundary between the two deliberately indistinct.
“For the most part, I work with the context of the regions of Left-Bank Ukraine where I have lived, which I understand and know well. I was strongly influenced by the Kharkiv school—I mainly studied under monumentalists, and still retain the limited colour palette I learned there. The Kharkiv school of drawing also had a strong influence on me: I copied a lot of works by my teachers and other well-known figures. I consciously continue to work exclusively with monumental and easel painting, but before the actual work begins, I turn to archival materials or local histories behind the places and objects I depict,” Synytsia emphasises.
The artist has also created a site-specific work directly in the gallery space. “I wanted to make something the size of a wall—this comes up often in my practice,” says Karina. “The work depicts a moment of transplanting flowers: the pots seem to hang in space above a fountain into which water flows. On the fountain is a sculpture from the Kharkiv embankment: a man missing a leg. The sculpture's leg was damaged during the Second World War, and the sculpture was later dismantled.”
