Yana Bestrova

Crossing Art is pleased to present Yana Bestrova: Do You See What I See, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Featuring a recent body of abstract landscape paintings, the exhibition offers a meditative yet urgent exploration of perception, memory, and the subjective nature of seeing.

Based in Paris and born in Kyiv, Ukraine, the artist’s work emerges from the intersection of Eastern European painterly tradition and a deep engagement with contemporary abstraction. Her visual language—layered, gestural, and luminous—renders landscapes not as fixed geographies but as evolving emotional terrains.

The title, Do You See What I See, serves as both an invitation and a challenge, evoking questions around authorship, identity, and the objectivity of the viewer’s gaze. The landscape becomes not only a site of external observation, but an interiorized field of reflection—an intimate cartography shaped by exile, memory, and reconstruction.

Bestrova primarily works in acrylic oil and mixed media on canvas. Her paintings are richly textured, with sedimentary layers of paint that echo geological formations or distant topographies blurred by time. These are not literal depictions, but rather intuitive responses—landscapes of feeling—where abstraction becomes a method for reclaiming space and self. Throughout the exhibition, recurring chromatic motifs—ashes of blue, burning ochres, silver-veiled greens—recall earth and sky, fire and sea, yet resist narrative closure. These canvases ask viewers not only to look but to question how they look, and what they bring with them to the act of seeing.

Yana Bestrova was born in 1966 in Kiev, Ukraine. In 1984, she received her M.F.A from Kiev Academy of Fine Arts. In 1991, Bestrova relocated to Paris, France. The artist has exhibited internationally in major institutions including the Coral Gables Museum (Florida), Zimmerli Art Museum (New Jersey), and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), among others. Bestrova works and lives in Paris, France.