Yelena Lewis
winner Challenge 2022
Yelena Lewis
Profile updated in 2026
Yelena Lewis is a figurative artist working from her studio in France. Born in Soviet Russia and shaped by a life lived across different European contexts, her practice is deeply influenced by the diversity of human experience and by the emotional contradictions that define life.
Working primarily in oil on canvas, but also through ink, pen, tempera on wood, engraving, sculpture, mixed media and acrylics, Lewis creates works that move between tenderness and tragedy, irony and vulnerability, intimacy and myth. Her figures often appear suspended in a symbolic space where personal emotion and universal narrative meet.
For Lewis, art does not simply imitate life. It records it. Her work preserves the complexity of human existence: joy and misery, happiness and sadness, tranquillity and anger, beauty and fragility.
In her mythological works, Lewis revisits figures such as Icarus, Eve, Medusa, Narcissus, the Three Fates and Eurydice, using ancient stories to question timeless human struggles: ambition, desire, injustice, vanity, love, compassion and destiny.
Her practice invites the viewer to look again at the human condition, transforming classical references into contemporary reflections on identity, vulnerability and emotional truth.
Curatorial Critical Note
Yelena Lewis’s work is rooted in a figurative language that carries both delicacy and unease. Her paintings do not seek idealised beauty. They approach the human figure as a place of contradiction, where innocence, irony, pain and memory coexist.
The artist’s use of myth is particularly significant. Greek and Christian references do not function as decorative quotations, but as narrative structures through which Lewis reflects on the repetition of human experience. Icarus and Eve become figures of desire and punishment. Medusa becomes the image of injustice and violation. Narcissus becomes a warning about vanity and self-absorption. Eurydice opens a meditation on love, fragility and loss.
Her figures often appear quiet, almost still, but they carry an emotional charge beneath the surface. The softness of the pictorial treatment does not erase the tragic dimension. On the contrary, it makes it more intimate.
Lewis’s practice interests NNC Gallery because it brings together personal sensitivity, symbolic narrative and a direct reflection on human vulnerability. Her work reminds us that mythology is not distant from contemporary life. It continues to speak through bodies, gestures, wounds, desires and fears.
In this sense, Yelena Lewis uses painting as a space of emotional preservation. Her images record life not as a linear story, but as a field of opposing forces: tenderness and violence, humour and grief, beauty and disturbance, memory and transformation.
It is said that art imitates life.
For me, art records life. It preserves both its extraordinary diversity and its deep interconnection. An artist recreates and records life in its physical manifestations, but also in its intangible and often opposing emotions: joy and misery, happiness and sadness, bliss and grief, tranquillity and anger.
Art helps us look at ourselves from another perspective.
For me, art is also a way to speak out, to articulate thoughts and reflections, and to share experience and knowledge. It becomes a space where life can be observed, questioned and preserved through image, matter and emotion.
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