Lesia Khomenko: Art and war

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1:17Lesia Khomenko:We're walking down a street with red brick houses and fire escapes. Feels quintessential New York.

1:25Lucy Ash:Yeah, we are walking toward Hudson River. The studio is facing to the Hudson River. And it's very windy that winter. And it really makes me feel that I'm living in the ocean side.

1:46This corridor reminds me of Kiev Studios.

1:51Lucy Ash:It reminds you of your studio in Kiev? Yeah, because it's all the wooden stairs and buildings from the 19th or early 20th century.

2:01Lesia Khomenko:Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Ash. It's April 2025, and I'm in the West Village of New York's Manhattan with the Ukrainian artist Lesya Chomenko. Long before the full-scale Russian invasion, she was famous for her activism, her paintings and for mentoring young artists.

2:33Lesia Khomenko:We're in an old telephone laboratory, a sanctuary for countless painters and sculptors since the 1970s. Lesia's got a studio up on the third floor where she's preparing work for a solo show in Kiev. Ukraine's capital and her home city. In the weeks leading up to the war, Lesia's husband, Max Robotov, a video artist and musician, suggested they should pack up their artworks and equipment and send them to the relative safety of Lviv, a city close to the Polish border. But they never got around to it. Early on February 24th, 2022, Lesia's phone rang.

3:16Lucy Ash:My mom called me at 5 a.m. and said, it started. And I remember that I can't breathe. I was like... That moment was the most terrible ever in my life. And, of course, I woke up with my daughter. We were not sure if it's any safe road, because West and North were already occupied by Russians, and they literally shoot civilians in cars. Tons shoot them. Who knows what happened with Kiev next? So we packed our stuff in 15 minutes probably. And I took mostly blankets because it was winter.

3:52Lesia Khomenko:Lesia and her mother, husband, sister, daughter and the dog and cat squeezed into her battered old Skoda and drove towards the Polish border. Her father stayed with her grandmother. She'd escaped Kiev in World War II and was refusing to leave the city again. You couldn't take any of your own work with you in the car, could you, from Kiev?

4:14Lucy Ash:I took on a set of drawings that I did on Revolution during my time 2014. It was a tiny box and important documents also. I would never recreate it again. Of course, I didn't take my works because it's huge. I had two storages of works in Kiev. And in the case that it will be occupied, I was sure that it would be destroyed. That you would lose it all? Yeah, so I had feelings that all my biography vanished in one moment and to prove that I'm an artist I should immediately keep doing. It was, I don't know, instinct. Keep painting? Keep producing because everything is destroyed and we should resist.

4:55Lesia Khomenko:The town in western Ukraine where they ended up was packed with refugees sleeping on the floors of warehouses and schools. As well as the trauma at being uprooted, many artists like her were frustrated that they had no place to work, so Lesia set up temporary studios, using money donated by artist friends from outside Ukraine. Her first painting in response to the conflict, Max is in the Army, was inspired by a photo her husband sent her from his military base. She was struck by the change in his body language. He'd become a soldier.

5:38Lucy Ash:After a few days he called me and I asked him, are you saluting to your commander? He said, yes, sometimes I salute him. Can you show me? And at night he did a selfie, saluting. Dark background, nothing is clear, because he also didn't take any pictures inside the unit. Of course, it was forbidden, because it was a strategic location. And he is still not in the uniform yet. And it's still Max, but by his behavior, he's already a soldier. I immediately thought, oh, but it's such a great image of how society is transforming to the army. We start to watch the internet, follow these news, and we start to see these dead bodies.

6:22Lucy Ash:As an artist, we were trained to draw skeletons and, you know, muscles and so on. But we saw, like, real dead bodies, like forbidden images. And we understood that it's too extreme. And through this image of Max, I decided that it's a good thing to explain that it could happen with everyone.

6:43Lesia Khomenko:Lesia's full-length portraits depicted Max in jeans, trainers and a hoodie, along with other men turned into soldiers overnight. Engineers, lawyers and musicians, all in casual clothes, but with pistols.

6:58Lucy Ash:It's also so funny how the civilians are holding a weapon. Someone put it on a belt, someone hold it in a hand, you know. How they try to adjust their body to weapon, because they never probably touch it, I don't know. And by the law, they had to carry it all the time.

7:17Lesia Khomenko:And how did Max react to the way you depicted him?

7:22Lucy Ash:Oh, he liked. We had such a strong connection as an artist always. And I already moved to the US and then to New York. he was only one whom I could send unfinished work and he really was hungry send me an image, what you did today every stage of my process I was sending him for him it was important

7:46Lucy Ash:so a big part of my daily routine in studio based on working in albums

7:51Lesia Khomenko:and these are kind of A3 size like cartridge paper yes

7:56Lucy Ash:and I have several opened on a table because I'm working with watercolor. I'm not making detailed sketch, but I do many. So you've got two sketchbooks open at a time? Minimum two, yeah. So this is drying and I'm working in another. I don't want, you know, to take it away. But what is important also that when I'm working with a canvas, often new ideas are coming. So it's my way of working. Sometimes I make just a few wines and I need to write down what it doesn't mean because I will forget.

8:33Lesia Khomenko:Lesia's albums are like reporters' notebooks full of raw data and half-formed ideas. In her New York studio, there are rolled-up canvases against the wall and laundry baskets on the floor filled with tubes of acrylic paint. In another corner, she keeps her favourite brushes and tools.

8:52Lucy Ash:A staple gun. Staple gun my husband gifted to me but I have another staple gun from my father but it's from Vienna Father also equipped me when I visited him in Vienna so I have this connection and I have hammer small hammer also from my father

9:11Lesia Khomenko:Lesia comes from a creative family her mother and her aunt are architects her father and her sister are artists and her grandfather Stepan Repin was a well-known painter in the Soviet Union. One of her early projects, Eyewitness, is inspired by her grandfather's sketches of the 1941 German invasion of Ukraine.

9:39Lesia Khomenko:Lesia also uses video to explore how the body is seen through the dehumanising lens of military technology now that wars can be fought with remotely controlled drones. She studies missile strike footage frame by frame, incorporating these images into a single painting.

10:01Lesia Khomenko:On one wall hangs a work she's just finished, Sea Battle, which depicts the sinking of a Russian warship by Ukrainian drones. The images come from a mobile phone recording made by a Russian sailor who was later rescued.

10:19Lucy Ash:This video was incredible because it's depicted from the position of the Russians and they tried to shoot these drones. They really can't see them because it's very dark and drones are looking like sharks in iconic American movies. And they're like running from one side of the boat to another in panic. Somehow I knew that this boat sank. and it was evidence that it was attacked by the drones. It was almost like a battle between David and Goliath. In the Bible? Yes, but from the perspective of Goliath. And I wanted to balance this darkness of this night sea and also when the guy was running from one side of the boat to another, the telephone was shaking.

11:13Lucy Ash:but I think I really managed to keep this feeling what is becoming like a prison if you are trapped on it.

11:24Lesia Khomenko:It's a very dynamic painting, isn't it? Because the position of this sailor in green, the way that his body is sort of leaning forward a bit, it kind of really encapsulates a sense of fear. And then this leg that's coming out of a kind of huge sheet of flames It's an absolutely fantastic painting. It stands in this tradition of history painting. We've just been joined in the studio by curator Bjorn Geldof, the director of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, who's come to New York to brainstorm with Lesia. You have, in a way, a synthesis of a three-minute action video that depicts destruction of that boat.

12:10Lesia Khomenko:And it's a painting, when you stand close to it, you cannot capture it. You need really that distance. Even the studio is too small to really view the painting as a unity. But what I believe now looking at it for the second day is that Leysha really succeeded to create that composition that brings these three minutes all together in one single image that is fragmented on one hand, but unified in its composition. So, absolutely beautiful, beautiful way of history painting.

12:38Lucy Ash:I would say Maybe cardboards?

12:41Lesia Khomenko:You know, what I'm doubting about is the styles between Max in the army and the friends. It's a little bit...

12:48Lucy Ash:Too similar?

12:50Lesia Khomenko:I think they will compete with each other in this space. Lessia and Bjorn are bent over a cardboard model of the exhibition's base in Kiev, where her work will be displayed from August. Not all of it will be on walls. One room will feature an installation shaped like a 30-metre trench. So you have two experiences. One, you have the experience of entering into the sculpture and looking at an impossible painting to view because you're much too close to it. And at the same time, experiencing this very claustrophobic feeling of being in a trench. But once you go up and you think you're at the end of the exhibition, that space reopens itself from a top view where you see others passing through these trenches.

13:38Lesia Khomenko:So you get this drone view almost on top of the trench.

13:43Lucy Ash:What is important for me is that there will be this possibility to look from the eye, from this drone perspective. Because what I'm thinking is that this changing method of watching each other through this particular war in Ukraine I will change a lot in our world. And maybe one of the missions of the artist could train attention. That's what I believe artists could do. For example, to discuss the merger of the gaze of humans and machines. And also to construct the nature of the violence.

14:20Lesia Khomenko:Not only does she make the painting a sculpture that a person interacts with, she also makes the viewer the performer of her sculpture. And I think that's an important aspect because it very much speaks about the unwillingness to enter into a war. Most individuals who are on the front line didn't choose to be on the front line. And in a metaphorical way, I think this work really resonates exactly that reality of being in an unwanted situation, but no other choice than go through it. Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning.

15:05Lesia Khomenko:Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. Throughout this World Cup, David Beckham has been everywhere. In the stands, in commercials, during ad breaks, sorry, hydration breaks. Which is wild when you consider he was once the most hated man in Britain.

15:40Lucy Ash:I turned around to a fan and he was screaming about my wife and about Brooklyn right to my face and wouldn't even look away.

15:48Lesia Khomenko:How do you go from that to being a billionaire? That's next time on Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.