War artists
War artists are artists who record war through art — from official state commissioning schemes (Britain established one in 1916 and revived it in 1939) to independent practice by artists working inside their own country while the fighting continues. In Ukraine the role became widespread after 2014 and especially after the full-scale invasion of 2022: artists document, testify and raise funds for the defence, and some of them serve.
Historically the term describes an institutional practice: the state commissions artists to record a war. Britain's official scheme began in 1916 and was revived in 1939; Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer worked through it. The commission determined both access to the front and the limits of what could be shown.
Ukrainian practice between 2014 and 2026 is structured differently. There is no single commissioning programme — there are artists who stayed and kept working inside a country at war, each choosing their own form of testimony.
Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko are ceramicists from Kharkiv who make miniature painted porcelain figures. Leontyev, a Special Forces veteran, trains civilians to handle weapons; Stasenko keeps painting the porcelain. «Porcelain War», the documentary about them, won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance (2024) and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2025). Cinematography by Andrey Stefanov.
Zhanna Kadyrova, after leaving Kyiv, settled in a Carpathian village and made «Palianytsia»: river stones cut into what read as slices of bread. The title is a shibboleth the occupiers cannot pronounce. The works were shown in Venice in April 2022 and the proceeds went to the defence effort and to volunteer organisations.
Lesia Khomenko paints life-size portraits of soldiers. Because serving soldiers are forbidden to circulate their own photographs, she works from pixelated press images and from descriptions heard in phone calls with her husband, who enlisted.
One strand is not making but rescue. On 25 February 2022 the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum near Kyiv was shelled; by the 27th it had burned down. Fourteen of the twenty-five works by Maria Prymachenko held there were carried out of the burning building, moved between hiding places, and shown in Kyiv for the first time in September 2022.
