Dymchuk Gallery presents Inga Levi’s solo exhibition, Cultural Forest. The project features paintings from various series created between 2020 and 2026, through which the artist captures the duality of today’s landscape.
Since the outbreak of full-scale war, the forest has ceased to be merely a place of solitude or renewal. It has taken on a new purpose—becoming a place of learning, tactics, adaptation, and survival—and this shift in perspective is central to the project.
The very concept of the “cultural forest” refers to artificially created forest plantations, planted by humans for various purposes. In Levy’s paintings, the forest emerges as an environment where culture, war, memory, recreation, and shifts in perception intersect.
Since 2020, the artist has gradually shifted from the urban landscape to the theme of “third nature” (a new type of environment emerging from the deep intertwining of nature, technology, and culture). Fragments of the forest within the city first appeared in the projects Anthropometric Landscape (2020) and District Hauntology (2021)—a series of landscapes featuring sports fields in the courtyards of new residential complexes, where Levy captured a mystical state within everyday space. “…is closed” was added to the series’ title after the start of full-scale war. The artist recalls that the mystical tension, the abstract anxiety she felt in that space, was supplanted by the air raid siren, and the emerald nets of the sports fields unexpectedly found their continuation in anti-drone nets, which became an element of the frontline landscape in 2025.
cultural forest
“This is a cultural forest,” said our tactics instructor during the basic course on national resistance, standing by a neighborhood marker in the forest amid the echoes of tank fire from the training ground.
Only now have I begun to appreciate the forest as a place of recreation—ironically, just when it, too, like those who joined the army, seems to have changed its nature.
The principles of adaptation are the same in nature and in war—in both cases, the logic is: to change the way you interact with the world to increase your chances of survival.
At first, to cope with the experience of war, I went to the forest for peace. And later, to test my ability for active action (during training at the National Resistance Center 23). And I inevitably return to this experience again and again.
But still, as an artist.
New paintings, in which previous themes unfold in unique ways, were created after a three-year hiatus. Since the start of the full-scale war, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of picking up a brush, working with color, or thinking objectively. Apart from the large canvas, I used only materials that had been sitting in my studio for many years, waiting for their moment—as if paying homage to good old-fashioned painting, as an expression of vitality.
Inga Levi
about the artist
Born in Kyiv. Graduated from the Publishing and Printing Department of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, majoring in book graphics, in 2011. In 2021, she completed the Contemporary Art course at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts. She became a fellow of the Gaude Polonia program of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the field of Visual Arts. She completed her master’s degree at the Intermedia Department of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, Poland, in 2024. In 2018–2019 and 2021, she served as the curator of mosaic works during the restoration of the Stars and Constellations fountain and the monumental interior design of the Kyiv Central Bus Station (designed by Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko). She lives and works in Kyiv.