Andrea Festa gallery is pleased to present Eternal Conduit, a solo exhibition by Anastasiya Tarasenko in Sala Nova, on view from July 9 to September 18, 2026.
The opening will take place on July 9, from 6 to 9 pm, at Lungotevere degli Altoviti 1, Rome, first floor.
“I often find myself contemplating the forces of nature that shape us and the metaphors they offer for our internal emotional landscapes. The turbulent oceans of our minds are equally fraught with danger, yet those same forces also grant us an immense capacity for joy, wonder, desire, and vitality.
The figures in my works exist amidst chaos: unforgiving seas, violent lightning, and monsters of the deep. The question is whether they are suffering or thriving. What joy might be found in dancing within a storm? They are naked, erotic, and vulnerable, yet there is also agency in their movement, a sense of surrender that is simultaneously an act of defiance.”
— Anastasiya Tarasenko
Eternal Conduit brings together a new body of paintings and works on antique cleavers by Anastasiya Tarasenko. Across intimate vignettes of rocky oceans, perilous escapes from towering heights, and figures howling at lightning as a wolf howls at the moon, the exhibition explores states of vulnerability, transformation, and ecstatic resistance.
Each work is imbued with longing: not merely the desire to survive, but the will to thrive. Tarasenko’s figures inhabit unstable worlds marked by storms, fire, water, and violence, yet they do not appear only as victims of these forces. They move through them, surrender to them, and at times seem to harness them. Their bodies become conduits of energy, suspended between fragility and determination, fear and desire, collapse and renewal.
In the knife series, antique cleavers collected by the artist over the past year become charged objects. Rusted, weathered, and marked by time, they carry their own histories of use and violence. Their original function remains legible, prompting questions about who once wielded them and for what purpose. Now retired from utility, they are transformed into vessels for painting: objects of contemplation rather than use. In one work, a small teardrop-shaped cutout in the cleaver reveals a hidden painting within. Amid a dark and stormy night, a sunlit day appears, suggesting the possibility of light within rupture, or renewal within threat.
In Flight of the Valkyries, small female figures fall from the sky like meteors. Ablaze and surrounded by lightning, they descend toward the earth engulfed in fire. Suspended in a moment of becoming, their potential remains unknown. The work evokes life as a great catapult: time moves in only one direction, carrying us forward with a momentum beyond our control. Tarasenko’s figures become creatures of possibility, capable of both creation and destruction, for good or ill.
Ultimately, Eternal Conduit explores the chaotic and unstable momentum of life and the forces that propel us through it. Vulnerable yet determined, fragile yet yearning, Tarasenko’s figures embody a fundamental human condition: the desire to continue forward despite uncertainty, searching for meaning, joy, and transformation amid the storm.
BIO
Anastasiya Tarasenko was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1989, and moved to the United States with her family in 1995. She received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally, and she has curated several group exhibitions in New York, Boston, and Germany. In 2024, she was an Artist Fellow at the National Arts Club and an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects. Tarasenko currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
