Mary Tkachenko: Colour as Architecture

There is something immediately recognisable about Mary Tkachenko's paintings. The grids, the gradients, the way each panel of colour bleeds softly into its neighbour — her canvases operate like visual music: structured, repetitive, yet endlessly surprising.

Tkachenko works with acrylic on canvas, building her compositions from modular units of colour arranged in horizontal and vertical sequences. The result is a body of work that sits between colour field painting and geometric abstraction — rigorous in its logic, but warm and sensory in its effect.

Her titles offer a clue to the emotional register she is working in: Heatwave, Aura, Dew, Air at 5pm. These are paintings about light at specific moments, about the quality of atmosphere and the memory of sensation. Colour is not decorative here — it is the subject.

What distinguishes her practice is a willingness to let the gradient do the work. Rather than clean, hard-edged transitions, each block of colour is alive with variation — the surface registers the hand, the brush, the time of making. In Prismatic and Reflection, the largest works in her current series, this approach reaches its most ambitious expression: canvases that hold multiple chromatic worlds in tension, asking the eye to travel and settle, travel and settle.

More recently, Tkachenko has extended her practice into three dimensions with Rosée — a set of nine plaster reliefs on wood panels in tones of blush, rose and burgundy. The modular logic of the paintings translates into physical space, each panel a self-contained sculpture that reads differently depending on the light. It is a natural evolution: if colour is architecture, then architecture can be colour.

Mary Tkachenko's works are now available exclusively on FIVE ART. Prices range from €400 to €1,900.