By Maria Bregman, writer, art critic, curator, and cultural producer. She has authored critical articles for publications such as ELLE, Creativitys.UK, Life Magazine London, BLUR Art Magazine, and London Post, and curated art exhibitions, including Zurab Tsereteli’s solo exhibitions. As a presenter for CultFM and creator of a cultural project for Culture TV, she has broadened public engagement with the arts. Her achievements include organising international art and music festivals in the UK, Tunisia, Israel, and Russia, serving on the jury for the Vasily Kandinsky Art Prize, and the Russian Academy of Arts.
In an art landscape saturated with instant gratification and sensory overload, Ulviyya Seyidova – known as Assaya – crafts sanctuaries of stillness. Her work, a confluence of cosmic wonder and visceral humanity, defies the ephemeral to probe the eternal. Like Frida Kahlo, whose pain became pigment, Assaya’s practice is forged in the crucible of survival. A stage 4 cancer diagnosis silenced her world, only to amplify her vision. What emerged transcends autobiography: paintings that pulse with the rhythms of existence itself, where particles hum and galaxies whisper.
Assaya’s canvases are laboratories of the unseen. Each brushstroke, applied with horsehair tools of her own design, operates as a quantum event – simultaneously precise and indeterminate. Rejecting digital shortcuts, she layers acrylic and oil into textures that thrum with latent energy. The result? Surfaces that mimic subatomic turbulence, where wave-particle duality becomes visual syntax. Her technique, obsessive in its manual rigour, mirrors the unpredictability of quantum fields. “I paint not the static,” she explains, “but the tremor beneath.” Here, science and spirituality fuse: her gradients map celestial bodies and cellular structures alike, collapsing scale to reveal nature’s fractal heartbeat.
In her Fluctuation series, Assaya distils chaos into meditative order. Each painting is haunted by spectral faces – disembodied yet interconnected, emerging from an abyssal black background in otherworldly shades of blue. These apparitions, neither fully human nor entirely ethereal, evoke the liminal space between memory and oblivion. The repetition of faces suggests a continuum, a ghostly palimpsest where past and present coalesce. Their blurred contours dissolve into the void, resisting definition, as if shifting between states of being. The term fluctuation – a physicist’s metric for systemic deviation – becomes, in her hands, a metaphor for resilience. These works are not static images but living organisms, their shifting hues responding to light and movement. Borrowing from Eastern philosophies of impermanence, she renders time visible: a presence that flickers, wavers, and ultimately endures.
Survival, for Assaya, is neither theme nor footnote – it’s the atomic structure of her practice. Facing mortality sharpened her perception, transforming each canvas into a defiance of limits. “When time fractures,” she says, “you paint not in hours, but in breaths.” Her process embodies this urgency. Entering a flow state, she dissolves into the work, merging with its rhythms. The paintings that emerge feel both ancient and urgent, as if excavated from some timeless stratum. Unlike the ironic detachment pervading contemporary art, Assaya’s sincerity is radical. Her pieces ask unanswerable questions: What lingers when the body falters? Can art become an afterlife?
As an art critic, I compare her to Agnes Martin’s transcendental minimalism or James Turrell’s luminous voids. Yet Assaya’s voice is distinct. Where Martin sought serenity through grids, Assaya finds dynamism in compression. Her canvases, dense with spectral detail, evoke black holes emitting light – paradoxes made tangible. Colours oscillate between ethereal and visceral: her blues recall both bioluminescence and the afterimage of a vanishing presence. Her geometry, organic and non-Euclidean, mirrors nature’s blueprints – river deltas, synaptic webs, electron orbits. This is transcendental minimalism rebooted for a quantum age, where beauty and intellect entwine.
Assaya’s legacy lies not in her survival narrative, but in her reimagining of art’s purpose. Her paintings refuse passive consumption; they demand participation. Stand before Interwoven, and the room seems to breathe with you. The faces within it hover in a liminal trance, neither fully formed nor entirely lost. This relational dynamic – where viewer and artwork oscillate in tandem – echoes quantum entanglement. Her art doesn’t represent energy; it becomes it.
What endures, beyond the accolades, is her invitation to see differently. In a culture obsessed with visibility, she unveils the hidden architectures of existence – the forces that bind star to soil, breath to bloodstream. Her work whispers: There is grandeur in the unseen. To engage with Assaya’s oeuvre is to surrender to fluctuation, to find solace in the universe’s endless becoming. She paints not for posterity, but for the present moment – a moment she has reclaimed, brushstroke by brushstroke, from the jaws of oblivion.
In this alchemy of transformation, trauma is not erased but transmuted. Her canvases, radiant with quiet ferocity, offer no easy answers. Instead, they hold space for paradox – a testament to the resilience that blooms where art and life collide.
