By Sara Bright | Published 11 April 2025 | Last updated 20 June 2026
Glafira Kotova’s Swing (oil on canvas, 40 × 30 cm) freezes a figure at the apex of momentum – weightless, suspended between ascent and the inevitable pull back down. It is a painting about the fraction of a second that childhood memory compresses into permanence, and it announces, with quiet authority, the concerns that have defined her practice since she arrived in London from Tula in 2022.
From Tula to London: A Practice Forged in Displacement
Kotova was born in 1999 in the Tula region of Russia, near the countryside estate of Yasnaya Polyana – Tolstoy’s home, and a countryside that would leave an indelible mark on her sensitivity to light and texture. Her earliest training came at the V.D. Polenov Art School in Tula, where she studied classical drawing and oil painting through plein air work, building a foundation in techniques that stretch back through the Russian realist tradition. In 2022, she completed a specialization in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York – an experience that opened her practice to abstraction and digital experimentation. She also holds a degree in Advertising and Public Relations from Moscow State University (MSU), which, as she has noted, sharpened her ability to construct visual narratives with communicative clarity.
The relocation to London without access to a traditional studio forced a material pivot. “Without studio space, I turned to digital tools,” Kotova told Lumen Art Gallery in a 2025 interview. “It was not a departure from oil painting – it was an evolution of my visual language.” That evolution now spans both media: oil paintings with thick impasto and tactile depth, alongside digital works that allow precision, layering, and the kind of chromatic transparency impossible in physical paint.
The Dualities That Drive the Work
Kotova’s stated aim – “to invite viewers to reflect on the dualities of life, crafting visual narratives that connect timeless themes with contemporary perspectives” – is not marketing copy. It describes a consistent structural principle visible across over 20 international exhibitions. In her paintings, chaos and order occupy the same frame. Nature and modernity collide without resolution. Cat’s Paw (40 × 30 cm, oil) isolates a feline paw, pads upturned, in a gesture of intimate trust that simultaneously suggests vulnerability. Inflatable Balloons (40 × 30 cm, oil) captures celebration at the precise moment before deflation – forms buoyant, luminous, already marked by time.
Art critic Anthony Fawcett, who served as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s personal curator and conducted 80 historical interviews with figures including Francis Bacon and David Hockney, reviewed Kotova’s work for Creativity’s UK in May 2025. He drew a direct comparison to Joan Miró: “Glafira Kotova’s oeuvre has the playfulness that one often finds in the work of Joan Miró. She beguiles us with her chromatic reverberations, every painting mingling her thick impasto palette, bursting with energy” (Fawcett, Creativity’s UK, 9 May 2025). Fawcett singled out Shards of Mind (32 × 32 cm, digital art) – a portrait of a girl in soft pastel blues and grays, trapped behind a lattice of thin forms – as evidence of Kotova’s capacity to convey “so many emotions in this one portrait.”
The comparison to Miró is pointed. Like the Catalan master, Kotova works in a zone between figuration and abstraction, where objects carry emotional rather than descriptive weight. Amusement Park (70 × 50 cm, oil) renders fairground energy as a whirl of light and pigment – recognisable, yet deliberately unstable, as though the scene were already dissolving in memory.
Exhibitions, Residencies, and Recognition
Kotova’s exhibition history spans two continents and a range of institutional contexts. In Russia, her work appeared at the “Multiplicity” group exhibition at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, Moscow (2022), one of the country’s most prominent contemporary art spaces. She participated in the “Russian Soul” exhibition at the Yasnaya Polyana Museum, Tula (2022), and completed the prestigious “Octava” art residency in Tula. In London, she exhibited at the Boomer Gallery, Tooley Street, in the “Join Me at What is Art” group show (January 2025), and her work is currently represented by the gallery on Artsy. In May–June 2025, she showed at the “Nulevoy Patiens” (Zero Patient) exhibition at Reservoir Workshop in Tula. Her work was also selected for the SoCro Art Exhibition 2025 at Click Clock Gallery, Croydon (2–27 June 2025), supporting the Lives Not Knives youth charity – an initiative she has championed to promote community engagement through art.
Press recognition includes features in FAD Magazine, Artist Talk Magazine, Modern Renaissance, Elle, and Artmoscovia. Her work is held in private collections in the UK, Russia, and continental Europe.
Ephemeral Beauty as Method
The phrase “chronicling ephemeral beauty” is not decorative. It describes Kotova’s method: she paints moments at the edge of disappearance. A swing at its highest point. Balloons before they deflate. A cat’s paw extended in fragile trust. The carnival’s glow caught at the instant it begins to fade. What she shares with artists like Olafur Eliasson – whose luminous installations at the Hayward Gallery have explored similar questions of temporality – is an insistence that beauty is not a fixed property but a temporal event. It exists only in the passage between arrival and departure.
Where Kotova diverges from that lineage is in her material directness. Her oil paintings retain the physicality of impasto – paint layered thickly enough to cast its own shadows, to carry the memory of the hand that applied it. The digital works, by contrast, achieve transparency and light without weight. Together, they constitute a practice that holds the tension between presence and absence, between the thing itself and the impression it leaves behind.
Practical Information
Glafira Kotova – represented by Boomer Gallery, London Current works available via Artsy Instagram: @glafirakot_artist Website: gk-artist.com
Boomer Gallery Tooley Street, Tower Bridge, London SE1 boomergallery.net
See also: Glafira Kotova: Review of Art Works – Anthony Fawcett’s critical review on Creativity’s UK. Explore more on the Creativity’s UK Award page.
About the author: Sara Bright is an art critic and editor at Creativity’s UK. She writes on contemporary visual culture, with a focus on emerging European artists and the intersection of traditional and digital media practices.
Sources: Lumen Art Gallery interview with Glafira Kotova (2025); ArtRabbit artist profile; Artsy gallery listing; Painters-Online biography; Fawcett, Anthony. “Glafira Kotova: Review of art works.” Creativity’s UK, 9 May 2025; Behance portfolio; ArtMajeur profile.
