About

Photo: Helen Vdovichenko

Born in 1973 in Shostka, Ukraine. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Lelya Borisenko studied painting at the Donetsk Art College and easel graphics at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute (diploma, 1999). She then lived in Moscow, where she worked in design and continued to paint and exhibit, and in 2025 moved to Toronto.

Her paintings take familiar images, such as a Rubens portrait, a classical abduction scene or a meerkat, and move them into unexpected materials and surfaces: a preserving jar, the folds of a T-shirt, a chrome car.

Her work was shown in Future Pass, a Collateral Event of the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), and in the Animamix Biennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2009–10). Future Pass travelled to the Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam (2011–12) and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2012). Two of her paintings are in the collection of the UNEEC Culture and Education Foundation, Taipei. In 2026 her painting Green Bird was selected for the Sixth Annual Juried Show at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

Artist Statement

Over time, painting has become more to me than a pursuit of technical perfection. Technique, composition, and craftsmanship remain essential, but they are no longer the goal. They allow me to approach something that technique alone cannot reach.

Standing before a blank canvas, I often have the strange sensation that the painting already exists somewhere beyond the visible. I do not begin with ready-made answers. I work through observation, intuition, and trust until a moment comes when the painting begins to lead me rather than follow me. My task is to sense where it wants to go.

I titled one of my early works The Moved Values. Years later, I realized that, without knowing it, I had given a name to the guiding principle of my artistic practice. Familiar images leave their expected surroundings and enter another time, material, or system of meaning. Rubens’s Hélène Fourment finds herself inside a three-litre jar, like homemade preserves. The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus unfolds across the folds of a T-shirt. My meerkats, too, leave their familiar world: these small wanderers appear on the chrome surfaces of vintage cars, the polished forms of contemporary sculptures, and the bodies of gleaming droids.

Through displacement, a familiar image loses its stability. The classical encounters the everyday; reverence coexists with humour; beauty carries an undercurrent of unease. I am interested in what remains within an image when it leaves its familiar surroundings, and how its meaning changes in a new context.

I do not plan these encounters in advance. They often emerge intuitively, and I have learned to follow them. Perhaps this is because I know the experience of displacement from within. I was born in Ukraine, studied in Donetsk and Kharkiv, worked in Moscow, and now live in Toronto. For me, displacement is not only geographical. It is the experience of existing between different places, histories, and ways of seeing the world.

My academic training gave me discipline and a solid foundation in drawing, composition, and technical mastery. Today, the slowness of painting and the physical resistance of the material matter deeply to me. Every layer retains the trace of a decision, a hesitation, or a correction. Whatever medium I work in, I want everything I touch to change form—to become something other than it was while retaining a trace of my presence. Each new work gives me an opportunity to enter that invisible space once again and discover something I did not know before.