Artist Statement Examples from Working Artists

In 2017 I interviewed a Ukrainian painter who lived in Fridingen, a small German town inside a nature reserve, with a forest, ruins, and medieval castles within walking distance of her studio. Mariia Sulymenko had spent seven years training at art academies in Stuttgart and Offenbach, showed at SCOPE Miami Beach, and drew illustrations for Die Zeit. When I asked her what her watercolors were about, she did not mention any of that. She said the artist's main goal is the acceptance of the absurdity of being.

One sentence, and suddenly her strange, cinematic scenes with lighters, cellophane, and candelabras made sense as a body of work rather than a collection of images. That is what a working statement does, and it is why the best examples to learn from are not the polished texts on gallery websites but the way artists actually describe their practice when someone asks them directly. Over three years of interviewing artists for ART UKRAINE, I collected dozens of these moments. Here are three worth studying, and what each one teaches.

Where These Examples Come From

Each example below comes from a published interview I conducted between 2017 and 2018, which matters for one reason: these artists were speaking, not writing. Nobody was performing for a grant committee. The lesson runs through all three, because a statement that reads like transcribed conversation almost always beats a statement that reads like an essay, a point I make at length in the guide to writing an artist statement. What follows is the other half of that argument: the evidence.

Example 1: The Statement Built on a Philosophy

Sulymenko's position, as she explained it in our interview, grew out of reading Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist writer, and she followed the thought further: absurdity, she argued, has more in common with common sense than we admit, because it connects to nostalgia and to the impossibility of recovering a lost paradise.

Notice what this gives a reader. A named influence, a philosophical claim, and a reason the work looks the way it does, all in the space of two sentences. Her process is improvisational, she composes exhibitions like film montage rather than around a single concept, and her recurring objects behave like characters that continue from one painting into the next. None of that would hold together without the central idea, but with it, everything does.

The lesson: if your work grows from a conviction, name the conviction and name its source. "Influenced by philosophy" is decoration. "The acceptance of absurdity, via Kharms" is a statement.

Example 2: The Statement That Describes a World

When I spoke with Stepan Ryabchenko for the ART NOW series, he described his practice as virtual mythology: the creation and development of his own world, with its own atmosphere, landscapes and architecture, heroes, computer viruses and outlandish flowers. Since 2008 he has been giving computer viruses names, faces, and histories, and his digital flora bloomed into works shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.

His statement works because it is an inventory of a place only he has access to. He was not claiming to explore technology or question the digital condition, phrases that could sit under a thousand portfolios. He was telling you what exists inside the work: viruses as heroes, flowers that grow nowhere in nature, neon pieces that carry a childhood drawing into monumental scale. The specificity is the argument.

The lesson: if your work builds something, describe what it contains. Concrete nouns beat abstract verbs. A reader who can picture your world will remember it, and a reader who is told you "interrogate boundaries" will not.

Example 3: The Statement Anchored in Process

The painter Hanna Kryvolap, who has shown from Strasbourg to Frankfurt to Kyiv, told me something about technique that I have quoted to artists ever since: if you have the technique, you can experiment on any surface without limiting yourself. Her colors, she insisted, carry no literal interpretations, and her role is to follow what the canvas dictates.

This is a statement anchored not in theory or in a fictional world but in the act of painting itself, and it works because it makes a promise about how to look at the work. Do not decode these color combinations, it says, feel them. For an abstract painter that single instruction does more for the viewer than a paragraph of art history, and it also quietly asserts her academic training, since only a painter in full command of technique can afford to trust intuition this completely.

The lesson: describing how you work is a legitimate spine for a statement, as long as the how reveals a belief. Kryvolap's process implies her whole position on what abstraction is for.

How to Borrow the Pattern

Three artists, three different spines: a philosophy, a world, a process. What they share is that each statement makes one claim and commits to it, which is precisely what most drafts refuse to do, hedging between five themes because choosing one feels like closing doors. It is the opposite. The narrow claim is what makes the work legible.

So before you write, decide which of the three spines fits your practice, then say your claim out loud, record it, and keep the version that sounds like you talking. Keep the finished text between 150 and 300 words, in first person, and keep your biography out of it, since credentials belong in the bio, which is a different document.

And if you get stuck between spines, that is normal. The artists above had the advantage of a journalist across the table asking questions, and sometimes that outside pressure is exactly what a statement needs. It is also, not coincidentally, how I write statements with artists now: a conversation first, the text after. The statement was never hiding in your notes. It is in the way you answer when someone finally asks.