Viktoria Ganhao believes that life is never static, and neither is painting.
Born in Kyiv and now based in Portugal, she has lived across cultures, embraced new beginnings, and ultimately found her truest language in abstraction. Her paintings reflect this journey: layered, intuitive, and full of movement, they explore what happens when memory, emotion, and experience converge.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Viktoria creates luminous fields of colour that evolve through multiple layers of gesture, texture, and transparency. Each painting becomes a visual map of transformation—a record not of places themselves, but of the traces they leave behind. Moments, encounters, landscapes, and emotions are distilled into abstract compositions that invite viewers to navigate their own connections and interpretations.
Rather than offering fixed narratives, her work remains open and alive, revealing new relationships and meanings over time. Her paintings bring together energy and contemplation, creating spaces that continue to unfold with each viewing.
Today, her work is held in private and public collections across Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia, including the permanent collection of the Guarda Museum in Portugal, reflecting an ongoing dialogue between the paintings and those who choose to live with them.
Imagine a landscape. A garden. A feeling. Just imagine.
How free are you in your ability to imagine? Is it hard to face? Are you brave enough?
Guided by the notion of freedom in creativity, Viktoria Ganhao courageously attacks the canvas bringing plain white surfaces to life through an organic chaos bursting with color. Immediately captivating, her work engages the viewer, inviting them to come closer and inspect the impasto, the strokes, the meanings hidden behind the expression. And in this moment of visual allure we enter the world of Viktoria’s poetics filled with (human) nature, thought and touch.
After spending nearly two decades in fashion and as an entrepreneur, Viktoria Ganhao decided to give her talents to art completely. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, she experienced life in seven countries and enriched it with travel. Traveling continues to be an important part of her life, serving as the paramount inspiration in her work.
Her paintings, therefore, represent amalgamating memoirs of the events she witnessed and the emotions she sensed on her journeys. As she weaves the stories of distant places and people into the picture, we can treat her works as visceral narratives, abstracts of real stories, or fusions of multiple tales hidden in floral, chromatically rich, moving depictions. As a mirror, the artist invites the observer to embrace the same freedom she approaches her work with. And we are finally left to our own imaginations to be awakened by her inciting canvases, as we develop intuitive narratives of our own.
The only atmospheric hint we will get is in the titles of works, named, for example, “Best Moments” or “Celebrating Life”.
Viktoria Ganhao’s painting is formally abstract. Unpacking the process behind it, we can detect bold expressive strokes, thick impasto, layers of paint and a particularly brilliant sense of color. She takes the best elements of the modern historical practices and fuses them into an unexpectedly unique and contemporary personal language. Her work is distinctive and that is hard to achieve.
But she does it by staying true to her concept and without dedicating herself to a single technique. She toys with different paints and textures, uses both brushes and palette knives, and allows herself to use bold color to express her vision. The result is remarkably harmonious, which shows the artist’s genuine dedication, and also a high technical prowess.
At the end, what we leave with is the atmosphere she creates and the emotions radiating from her painting.
Ana Bambic Kostov
Art historian, writer, and editor
A FORM OF LIFE
“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” ― Cy Twombly
A form of abstract life concretizes the perception of the mental image through a morphingof possibilities, solidifying it on the retina for fractions of a second, minutes, or even hours. It's a poetic discourse.
In Viktoria Ganhao's work, we encounter the matter of Cy Twombly's flowers, the light of Tiepolo's skies, the composition of certain views by Monet, and the expressionistic language of Joan Mitchell. A cascade of visual possibilities that the vigorous strokes of her brush and palette knife freeze in time, transforming the canvas into a subjective perceptual mirror. The artist's ability to catalyse her inner experience, daily life, the symbolism of totemic objects, the natural context in which she moves and lives, the sensory impression of the landscapes she explores while traveling, and transform it into a "positive" work of comparison for the audience, which, lovingly directed, has the opportunity to open the space of the mind and translate this composition into their own original sensory experience. In this way, abstract painting may be defined as figurative as it activates concrete images but also as a container of emotions in a "form" of color. Ganhao’s experience of painting practice is layered on multiple levels enriching the fluid narrative with details and insights, always remaining astonishing and metamorphic over time.
Viktoria Ganhao is a vital force. She believes in freedom and in the joy of living, her feeling is the explosion of a creative Supernova of new elements, an expanding expressive Big Bang that desires to involve people permeating their substance with light and wonder. The freedom to let others see and feel differently from oneself is a form of ethical education through tolerance with the ultimate goal of promoting humanity's evolution towards peace and the common good. The artist's sensitivity is accessible. Her proposal is gentle, non-intrusive, welcoming.
Her suggestions enter the soul effortlessly.
Barbara Fragogna, 2024
UNA FORMA DI VITA
“Immagnare un linguaggio è come immaginare una forma di vita.” ― Cy Twombly
Una forma di vita astratta concretizza in un “morphing” di possibilità la percezione dell’immagine mentale, cristallizzandola sulla retina per frazioni di secondo, minuti oppure ore. È un discorso poetico.
Nel lavoro di Viktoria Ganhao troviamo la materia dei fiori di Cy Twombly, la luce dei cieli di Tiepolo, la composizione di certe vedute di Monet e il linguaggio espressionista di Joan Mitchell. Una cascata di possibilità visive che i vigorosi tratti del pennello e della spatola fermano nel tempo trasformando la tela in uno specchio percettivo soggettivo. La capacità dell’artista di catalizzare nella pittura il suo vissuto interiore, l’esperienza quotidiana, il simbolismo degli oggetti totemici, il contesto naturale nel quale si muove e vive, l’impressione sensoriale dei paesaggi che esplora viaggiando, e di trasformarlo in un’opera “positiva” di confronto per il pubblico che, indirizzato amorevolmente, ha la possibilità di aprire lo spazio della mente e di tradurre questa composizione in un vissuto sensoriale proprio e originale. In questo modo la pittura astratta è figurativa in quanto attivatrice di immagini concrete ma anche come contenitore di emozioni in “forma” di colore. L’esperienza della pratica pittorica si stratifica su più livelli arricchendo la narrazione fluida di dettagli e spunti, restando sempre stupefacente e metamorfica nel tempo.
Viktoria Ganhao è una bomba vitale, crede nella libertà e nella gioia di vivere, il suo sentire è l’esplosione di una supernova creatrice di nuovi elementi, un big bang espressivo in espansione che desidera coinvolgere le persone permeandole di luce e stupore. La libertà di lasciare liberi di vedere e sentire diversamente da sé è una forma di educazione etica alla tolleranza con il fine ultimo di favorire un’evoluzione dell’umanità verso la pace e il bene comune. La sensibilità dell’artista è a disposizione. La sua proposta è gentile, non invadente, è accogliente. I suoi suggerimenti entrano senza fatica nell’animo.
