Sofya Yechina

Biography

Sofya Yechina (Sofija Ječina) is a painter and writer, born on Iturup Island in the Kuril Archipelago and based in Belgrade, Serbia, since 2016. She graduated in Painting from Kursk State University and holds an MA in Fine Arts.

Her professional career began in Russia and later developed across Germany, Austria, Serbia, and other international contexts. Over more than fifteen years, Yechina has held more than forty solo exhibitions in Russia, Germany, Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Bangladesh, and has participated in approximately 150 group exhibitions internationally.

In 2014, she received an international art scholarship in Speyer, Germany, and subsequently worked and exhibited in Germany and Austria before settling in Serbia.

Her works are held in museum, institutional, and private collections in Russia, Serbia, Germany, Austria, Finland, China, France, Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, and the United States.

Alongside her visual practice, Yechina is the author of Belgrade in Blue (2021) and 30 Paintings of Helma (2023). In 2021, the documentary film In Search of a Place, directed by Miroslav Bata Petrović, was released about her life and artistic practice.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

  • 2026 Jazz — Krpanov Dom Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art Pivka, Pivka, Slovenia
  • 2026 Red Core — Gallery of the Cultural Center of Vrbas, Vrbas, Serbia
  • 2025 Whirlpools of Light — Museum in Smederevo, Smederevo, Serbia
  • 2025 30 slika — RTS club, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2024 Between the Danube and the Rhine — Goethe-Institut, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2024 Schattenfiguren — MTS Hall, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2024 Lichtgestalt — Cultural Center Kovin, Kovin, Serbia
  • 2023 A Novel about London — Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad, Serbia
  • 2023 30 Paintings of Helma — 4SE Marina, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2022 Pannonian Reflections — Stara Pazova, Serbia
  • 2022 My Blue Stories — Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • 2022 Blue Stories — Požarevac, Serbia
  • 2022 Outside It’s Summer — Army Hall, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2022 Inner Landscapes — Cultural Center of Doboj, Doboj, Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • 2022 Inner Landscapes — Banski Dvor, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • 2021 Inner Landscapes — Cultural Center of Trebinje, Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • 2021 Other Shores — SKC, Pula, Croatia
  • 2021 My Eye – Serbia — Gallery ’73, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2019 Sofija Sofia Sofya Sophia — Laufer Art, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2018 In Search of a Place — Laufer Art, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2017 Rathaus Gallery, Schifferstadt, Germany
  • 2015 Erinnerte Landschaften — Treiber Gallery, Vienna, Austria
  • 2014 Along the Rivers — Speyer, Germany
  • 2013 Solo Exhibition, Kursk, Russia
  • 2011 N. A. Aseev Regional Library, Kursk, Russia
  • 2011 Kursk State University, Kursk, Russia

Selected Group Exhibitions

  • 2026 Art and Wine / Umetnost i vino — Vinogradareva kuća, Oplenac, Topola, Serbia
  • 2025 Đura – Inspiration — Kuća Đure Jakšića, Belgrade, Serbia
  • 2025 ARTE SYNHRONIC — ART SPACE KRUG, Budapest, Hungary
  • 2025 Spring Salon / Prolećni salon 2025 — Modern Gallery, Cultural Center “Mija Aleksić”, Gornji Milanovac, Serbia
  • 2025 34d Small Format Exhibition — Gallery of the Cultural Center Šabac, Šabac, Serbia
  • 2024–2025 Artists’ Books — Rigas Velestinlis (Feraios): Mia Prostagi Megali Nebojša Tower, Belgrade, Serbia Islahane Cultural Center, Thessaloniki, Greece Byzantine Tower of Galatista, Galatista, Greece Municipal School of Livadi, Livadi, Greece Zincirli Mosque, Serres, Greece
  • 2024 Between the Danube and the Rhine — Vienna, Austria
  • 2022 Artists’ Books: (1821–2021) Fyodor Dostoevsky — Municipal Art Gallery of Thessaloniki — Casa Bianca, Thessaloniki, Greece
  • 2021 Artists’ Books: (1821–2021) Fyodor Dostoevsky — 18th Thessaloniki International Book Fair, Thessaloniki, Greece
  • 2021 Artists’ Books: (1821–2021) Fyodor Dostoevsky — Livadi, Thessaloniki region, Greece
  • 2018 VI International Biennial Open Book of the Balkans — Čačak, Serbia
  • 2017 International Exhibition with Marina V. Popović — Schifferstadt, Germany
  • 2016 Zwischen Donau und Rhein — Vienna, Austria
  • 2016 Exhibition marking the 80th anniversary of the Kursk branch of the Union of Artists of Russia — Moscow, Russia
  • 2016 Myths — Vienna, Austria
  • 2016 Youth of Russia — All-Russian Exhibition of Young Artists, Moscow, Russia
  • 2016 Four Words About Peace — International Exhibition, Belgorod, Russia
  • 2015 Group Exhibition, Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis, Germany
  • 2015 Memory — International Exhibition dedicated to the Unknown, Russia
  • 2015 International Exhibition in Memory of Alexander Deineka — Kursk, Russia
  • 2014 Fourth Belgorod International Open Festival of Arts dedicated to Stanislav Kosenkov — Belgorod, Russia
  • 2013 XI Interregional Exhibition Artists from Central Russia — Lipetsk, Russia
  • 2013 Sport — All-Russian Art Exhibition, Kazan, Russia
  • 2013 First Interregional Exhibition of Artists from Orel, Belgorod and Kursk — Russia
  • 2013 Prokhorovskoye Pole — International Open Festival of Arts, Belgorod, Russia
  • 2012 Artist and Model — Interregional Exhibition, Russia
  • 2011 Belgorod International Open Festival of Arts dedicated to Stanislav Kosenkov — Belgorod, Russia
  • 2011 Interregional Exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the canonization of St. Joasaph of Belgorod — Belgorod, Russia
  • 2010 Young Artists of Russia — All-Russian Art Exhibition, Moscow, Russia

Awards & Memberships

Memberships

  • Member of ULUPUDS — The Applied Artists and Designers Association of Serbia — since 2025
  • Member of the Association of Artists of Vojvodina — since 2024
  • Member of the Association of Writers of Serbia — since 2024
  • Member of the International Association of Art (IAA) — since 2012
  • Member of the Union of Artists of Russia — since 2012

Awards

  • 2024 Prize for Best Exhibition, October Salon Kovin, Serbia
  • 2014 International Art Scholarship Speyer, Germany
  • 2014 First Prize, Freedom of Creation, Interregional Art Competition dedicated to Kazimir Malevich Category: Composition Kursk, Russia
  • 2012 First Prize, Image of the Motherland Category: Painting Kursk, Russia
  • 2012 First Prize, Art-Parad Interregional Festival of Contemporary Culture Category: Visual Art Kursk, Russia
  • 2012 First Prize, Interregional Competition Face Category: Painting Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2011 Second Prize, Archiperspektiva-2011 Category: Painting Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2010 Second Prize, Archiperspektiva-2010 Category: Express Competition Yekaterinburg, Russia

Collections

Works by Sofya Yechina are held in museum, institutional, and private collections in Russia, Serbia, Germany, Austria, Finland, China, France, Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, and the United States.

Museum and Institutional Collections

  • Belgorod State Art Museum — Belgorod, Russia
  • Kazimir Malevich Exhibition Hall — Kursk, Russia
  • Museum of Naive Art “Ilijanum” — Šid, Serbia
  • Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis Collection — Germany
  • State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan / Gallery of Modern Art — Kazan, Russia

Critical Texts

If her visual language were to be compared with a poetic form, it would certainly be haiku poetry, or a restrained Far Eastern verse, which through polished clarity and the apparent sparseness of nuances, without excess, provokes an explosion of associations spreading like concentric circles in the eye and spirit of the observer. These works become a kind of associative ‘maps’ or rather windows for contemplation.

Jelena Gavrilovic Poet and writer

Within the sensitive boundaries of contemporary art, the work of Sofya Yechina remains a powerful enigma. Her paintings exist both within and outside of time, combining figuration and abstraction. What is hardest to find among artists today is precisely what she possesses: an unmistakable style.

David Laufer Swiss gallerist, writer, and cultural commentator

Sofya Yechina chose pure painting, focused entirely on the expressive possibilities of line, color, and surface. She rejects external ways of explaining the world and the human being. Her art remains faithful to painting itself as an independent mode of understanding.

Miroslav Aleksic Award-winning Serbian poet and literary critic

Her Belgrade, despite its urban nature, is devoid of the noisy and restless spirit of great cities. It is dangerous in its deep silence, resembling a half-abandoned harbor settlement somewhere on the Baltic or North Sea. Its streets seem magnetically drawn toward the water, even when that water is icy and dark.

Within this city, she paints strange structures crowned with enormous chimneys and towers, resembling shelters of secret brotherhoods or Jung’s Tower, magical workshops of artists who, like Ovid, “plunged their spirit into unknown arts”, et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

Aleksandar Knezevic, PhD (Oxford) Theologian, philosopher, and author

Her paintings and writings intertwine through a search for stability. Concentration, solitude, and mysterious silence become central states of this artistic world. Urban outskirts, forgotten details, roads, and incidental spaces are transformed into emotional landscapes. In these works, everyday life acquires an almost metaphysical resonance.

Nikola Suica Art historian, curator, and professor of art theory

Sofya Yechina’s painting often feels as though it comes from the perspective of a being not entirely immersed in human experience, yet approaching it with intense, almost childlike curiosity, tenderness, and gentle wonder. It is as if the world is being observed by someone who does not completely belong to it, but touches it carefully, almost cautiously, trying to understand its matter, rhythm, and vulnerability. It is precisely from this distance that a particular sharpness of vision emerges.

Jelena Gavrilovic Poet and writer

Sofya Yechina possesses a rare sensitivity to the moment and the ability to transform the seen into a profound inner image. As in her painting, her artistic thinking is rooted in observation, memory, and the emotional experience of space. Her works may be seen as a map of a journey already traveled, both artistic and deeply personal.

Dragan Jovanovic Danilov Poet and art critic

The combination of stylization, restraint, and emotional expressiveness forms the greatest strength of Sofya Yechina’s painting. She filters the visible world through her own unique vision, creating a deeply personal artistic language. It is within this inner testimony that the truth of her paintings resides.

Vladimir Kolaric Cultural theorist and art critic

An intuitive and subjective perception of the world forms an essential part of her art. Through her works, Sofya Yechina conveys not only personal existence, but also the question of what it means to be an artist in the rapidly changing social, historical, and ecological realities of the 21st century. Her painting becomes an inner testimony of the time. Within it, one senses both fragility and strength.

Nikola Suica Art historian, curator, and professor of art theory

The central impulse of this artist is the desire to objectify her lyrical experience of the world, marked by a deeply personal voice. Her paintings radiate melancholy and a certain mystery arising between sensual and intellectual perception. A decisive role in this is played by her unique angle of vision, the distinctive ‘frame’ of Sofya Yechina.

Miroslav Aleksic Poet and writer

Sofya’s choice of subjects never trivializes life, it celebrates it. Bouquets of spring flowers beside a kiosk, an empty street in the early morning, the hope for a radiant day, all of this becomes a quiet testimony to the small things that make up human existence.

Milica Petrovic Art curator

Sofya Yechina penetrates to the core of her subjects, revealing their deeper meanings. She gives life to inanimate objects. With the light stroke of a brush, lines flow like a stream, and colors give birth to the soul of color.

Aminur Rahman Poet

Artist Statement

Sometimes the world feels too loud, too bright, too alive to me.

I look at shadows and try to understand what kind of objects could cast them. I have never perceived things as “just things.” Objects, streets, windows, water, empty rooms, and people all carry, for me, their own hidden tension, memory, and inner life.

When I look at an object, I am not interested in reproducing the object itself. I paint the feeling it leaves behind. My work begins in that fragile moment between seeing and sensing — when an ordinary place, a reflection, or a passing figure suddenly becomes emotionally overwhelming. Sometimes I feel that I am not painting cities, landscapes, or people, but the atmosphere that remains between them and myself.

I do not paint the external world in a documentary way. I am interested in what exists between light and memory, between silence and anxiety, between the human being and the space surrounding them. That is why my paintings are built through large fields of color, minimal detail, and the tension between line, emptiness, and presence.

My artistic language was shaped between the Russian avant-garde, academic painting, and German expressionism. Water and rivers have always played an important role in my life. The Danube, the Rhine, and the landscapes of the Balkans and the North became part of my inner artistic geography. For me, Belgrade is not simply a city, but a psychological landscape and a space of memory.

Alongside painting, I write prose and poetic texts. I have never separated image from language. Sometimes I think that my paintings are stories told through color, while my texts are paintings continuing through words.

I see art as an attempt to preserve the ability to feel deeply and to recognize the invisible hidden inside ordinary things.