Katya Tsareva is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working with painting, textile installation, and object-based practices. Her work centres on portraiture and the human body, which she approaches not as a stable image but as a site of tension - between intimacy and distance, attraction and discomfort, recognition and abstraction.

At the core of Tsareva’s practice is the moment of encounter with an unfamiliar image of a person. She is interested in how perception forms in the first seconds of looking, before interpretation becomes fixed, and how emotional responses - desire, unease, detachment, empathy - emerge almost involuntarily. Rather than treating the portrait as a biographical or psychological document, she constructs it as an unstable space where presence remains unresolved and fragile.

In recent years, Tsareva’s practice has developed through painting and installation, often expanding the portrait beyond the frame and into space. This approach was central to her two-part solo exhibition The Fleeting Light on Your Folds (2024), first presented as a site-specific installation at The Chapel in Brompton Cemetery, London, and later reconfigured for a vitrine setting at Voskhod Gallery in Basel. Combining watercolor works of varying scale with textile elements and torn paper surfaces, the project examined corporeality as a layered structure - a body experienced as both shelter and exposure, attraction and vulnerability.

The exhibition explored what it means to inhabit a body and why this experience can be simultaneously empowering and unsettling. Realism played a key role in this investigation, not as documentation but as a visual strategy that intensifies ambiguity, making the familiar feel unstable and emotionally charged.

These concerns extend into Tsareva’s installation practice. In The Tenderness (2025), she created an environment of soft, air-filled textile forms printed with skin-like imagery, evoking the idea of a “second skin.” The work invited the viewer into a physical encounter with sensual contradiction, where pleasure and discomfort coexist, and intimacy is inseparable from estrangement.
 

Alongside installation, Tsareva continues to develop painting series that interrogate beauty, desire, and the contemporary body. Her ongoing project Tender (2023–2025) approaches beauty as a cultural myth that is both seductive and coercive, applied today to male and female bodies alike. Working from found images and self-taken photographs, she modifies and reconstructs figures before translating them into paintings and watercolors, ranging from intimate formats to large-scale works. The resulting images balance attraction and repulsion, presenting the body as simultaneously vulnerable, sexualised, and fragmented.

Questions of mediation and perception are further explored in A Portrait (2025), a recent series in which Tsareva observes strangers in public spaces and writes detailed textual descriptions of their appearance. These texts are used as prompts for AI-generated images, which she then digitally alters, collages, and reworks by hand in watercolor. The final works exist between observation and invention, memory and fabrication, reflecting on how contemporary images of people are formed, distorted, and emotionally charged.

Tsareva has presented solo and duo exhibitions in the UK and Europe and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennales, including projects in London, Maastricht, Basel, and Brighton. Her work has been shown at international art fairs and featured in both print and online publications. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the LGC x Theo Paphitis Art Prize in London. Her works are held in museum and private collections in the UK and internationally.