Veronika Bondarenko
Propeller Member Since 2026
Veronika Bondarenko is a Toronto-based painter whose work explores the threshold between abstraction and recognition. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she builds layered images in which bodily, botanical, atmospheric, and psychological forms remain unstable and partially recognizable.
Bondarenko holds a BFA (Honours) in Drawing and Painting, with Distinction, from OCAD University. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto, London, and Kyiv, including at Bau-Xi Gallery, Propeller Art Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, Gallery 1313, She Said Gallery, The Youthful Vengeance, the Ontario Court of Justice, Millbank Tower, and the I. P. Kavaleridze Museum-Workshop. She presented her solo exhibition Fruits in the Night at Ada Slaight Gallery in 2025. In 2026, she received the Patricia Joy Alpert Memorial Award and was selected as an Akin Career Launcher recipient.
Alongside her studio practice, Bondarenko works in arts education, curatorial and exhibition development, and public programming. She has organized and co-curated exhibitions at Xpace Cultural Centre, The Youthful Vengeance, and OCAD University galleries, and teaches art to children, teens, adults, and older adults.
Artist’s Website: https://veronikabondarenko.format.com/
My paintings explore the threshold between abstraction and recognition, where forms remain mutable, partially legible, and open to more than one reading. Working primarily in oil on canvas, I build images through glazing, veiling, abrasion, erasure, repetition, and revision. Rather than beginning with fixed subjects, I allow forms to emerge gradually: anatomy may become landscape; fruit, seed, shell, vessel, current, or interior space may surface briefly before shifting into something else.
Veronika Bondarenko
I approach ambiguity not as vagueness, but as a constructed condition that keeps several meanings active at once. Colour, pattern, surface, edge, and accumulated marks hold bodily, botanical, psychological, and atmospheric states in tension. Meaning develops through association, material change, viewing distance, and duration rather than resolving into a single stable image.
My practice draws from embodied experience, natural structures, psychological inquiry, and Ukrainian cultural memory and folklore. These sources move into the work through atmosphere, repetition, pattern, and transformation, resurfacing as fragments, pressures, and shifting forms rather than as fixed symbols. I am interested in how a painting can remain precise without becoming closed—how perception, memory, and material can continue to act on one another through sustained looking.
