I paint faces broken into fragmented, non-naturalistic color — oil and pigment on canvas, built up in overlapping planes rather than blended tones. The subject is always figurative and recognizable, but the color never sits still on the skin the way it would in a realistic portrait.
My work centers on the occupation of Crimea, where I was born. I’m interested in the relationships of people living under occupation — how those still there carry it, what emotions and what tension shape them, how differently each person shows it. And how I carry it myself, living outside Crimea — the loss of home, the effort to rebuild connection with my family and with my Crimean Tatar roots.
This is also where I search for my own identity — as a Crimean, a Ukrainian, a woman with Crimean Tatar roots, a granddaughter trying to rebuild the connection to her family and to a heritage the occupation cut her off from.
Biography
Yuliia Pacholski-Kochubei was born in Sevastopol, Crimea, Ukraine, and has painted for as long as she can remember. As a child, she spent two years training under a Crimean artist, before later moving to Hamburg in 2014, where she graduated from the Design Faculty at HAW Hamburg and now works as a designer.
Painting has remained her constant thread through all of it. Her work explores what occupation does not through loss of life, but through rupture — the quiet misunderstandings, silences, and distances it creates within families and within a single person’s sense of self. At the center of her practice is an ongoing search for identity across shifting, sometimes conflicting layers: Crimean, Ukrainian, a woman with Crimean Tatar roots, a granddaughter, simply Yuliia.
Her work has been shown at a charity exhibition at Habibi Atelier and as part of Echoräume des Krieges at Magistrale Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (Oder).