top of page
Anna Yakusheva
Life as a project. Art as the doorway.
Biography
"I want to create meaning.
I don't want to be an idea,I want to create ideas.
Ideas are eternal, but people die."
Anna Yakusheva is a Ukrainian artist-researcher living in the UK.
She sees art as a form of deep exploration of human nature and a response to the 21st century human desire for meaning, freedom and inner integrity. In her works she combines personal experience, philosophical reflections and symbolic language, forming the author's trend of metaphysical art of the new time. Her work encompasses themes of transformation, archetypes, memory and intuition, opening up a space for the viewer to dialogue with themselves.
For her, art is not just a reflection of reality, but a way of revealing inner worlds. It is a path of questions to which there are no direct answers, but revelations.
Anna was born in 1991 in the village of Svetloye, Zaporozhye region. She was the first child in a simple family of a truck driver and a nurse. From early childhood she showed an interest in creativity, painting the walls of the house with her mother's lipsticks. At school she actively participated in creative and sports activities and spent a lot of time reading in libraries.
In 2007 she started studying academic drawing, classical painting and composition at the local art school. Anna continued her creative path and in 2013 she graduated with honours the Zaporizhzhya National Technical University and received a diploma in interior design. At the university she was a member of the student committee and actively participated in organising events and create decorations for students
plays and theatre productions. Studying the history and philosophy of the Bauhaus school, Anna created projects that took part in international design competitions, winning many prizes. She also began to study art history with great interest, in which she took a special interest in the Renaissance. She studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci and was inspired by Raphael's paintings.
In 2012 Anna moved to Kiev and worked first as an assistant designer, and two years later as a designer at design studio Sempre Arte. Her projects participated in international interior design competitions and were published in well-known magazines. She also painted paintings individually for the interiors of her projects.
In 2016, Anna accepted the challenge of fate, leaving a promising future as a designer and moving to the UK. Finding herself in a new country and becoming a mum for the first time in 2017, she faced social and cultural differences of mentalities. This period triggers a strong inner transformation in her. She begins to study in depth the topic of emotional intelligence, psychology, philosophy, astrology and spiritual practices, while developing her artistic technique in parallel, from book illustration to author watercolours. Between her studies and family concerns, Anna has given individual drawing lessons to children and adults, illustrated educational materials and children's books for private collections.
Drawing on an academic base, she has the courage and ability to experiment with traditional and contemporary approaches to representation, and seeks her voice through forms of avant-garde, surrealism and symbolism. She is inspired by Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. A particular influence on her development as an artist was her acquaintance with the work of Hilma af Klint - visiting her exhibition in London in 2023 was a point of inner turning and realisation of the profound essence of her path. In the same year, an important milestone was studying at the Julia Sysalova Art School, where Anna felt that she was ready to reach a new level and make a name for herself in the international art space.
In her search for universal meanings, Anna immerses herself in the philosophy of Tibetan teachings on the nature of reality, ancient mythology and theosophy. Referring to the ancient aphorism "Know thyself", she explores through artistic practice the fundamental questions of human existence, identity and the deep nature of the self.
At the intersection of personal experience, life observation and inner work, her signature technique - Quantum Collage - is born in 2024, which combines watercolour, text, symbolism and fragments of visual experience. It is not just a visual style, but a way of transmitting ‘signals’ - intuitive messages that encourage the viewer to self-exploration. Each element of her work becomes a reflection in which one can recognise one's own story, as if reading a personal message from the flow of life. Like the retina of the eye, each of her works is unique, multilayered and unrepeatable.
Today Anna is working on her first solo autobiographical exhibition "The Path to Inner Freedom", which will be part of the author's large-scale project "Life as a Project".
Her works are in private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Canada, Ukraine and Russia, and have been presented in international offline and online exhibitions.
Anna's biography is a journey of inner transformation that has become the foundation of her artistic practice. Each of her works is a scene from this journey, where the personal becomes a mirror for the other.
bottom of page