I am looking for something abstract based on reality” – that’s how Victoria Pidust (born 1992 in Nikopol, Ukraine) reflects on her artistic focus, which relies on painting and photography. Pidust’s works are hybrid, collage- like photographs inheriting a painterly-aesthetic appeal. For this, the artist captures moments from urban as well as private spaces; however, in further steps, she generates a profound reflection on processes of perception. She uses the medium of photography in order to reveal it as a means of modelling and alienating reality, far from its function of depicting reality. Pidust’s works are thus created within the tension of “destruction and creation”. Instances of the latter in Pidust’s work are her phone camera, screenshots, scans and especially the process of photogrammetry, a process of generating and transferring 3D models, primarily used in the field of architecture. Within this computer programme, the artist creates 3D spaces and is able to coordinate work-forming factors such as light, materiality and colour, just as one does in the classical composition process. In addition, she deliberately disrupts the software by withholding parts of the necessary image information. The artificial intelligence of the system thus takes on a creative function itself, contrary to ‘pattern recognition’. The results of this interplay of arbitrariness, deceptive programming and the artist’s subjective selection are then converted back into a 2D format and the haptic art object – mostly printed on Dibond – is created.

Victoria Pidust studied multimedia at the Institute of Book Studies and Printing Technology from 2010 to 2015, as well as photography at the NTUU KPI school in Kyiv. From 2013 to 2015, Pidust took private photography courses with photographers Roman Pyatkovka and Alexander Lyapin. In the following years she studied Visual Communication and from 2017 to 2020 Fine Arts and Painting, both at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. Pidust has been awarded numerous prizes such as the Mart Stam Prize (2020) and the National Photography Prize of Ukraine several times (2013, 2015, 2017). She has had solo shows at Kunstverein kjubh (2021) and ZERO FOLD Cologne (2020). Most recently, her work has been part of group exhibitions at FUHRWERKSWAAGE, Cologne, Stiftung Neue Kunst Berlin- Brandenburg (2022) and Marburger Kunstverein (2021) and was shown at the Curiosa Sector at Paris Photo (2021). Victoria Pidust lives and works in Berlin.