Nadia Ryzhakova

Nadia Ryzhakova (b. 1982, USSR) is a contemporary British painter. She studied Fine Art at the Stroganov Academy of Arts in Moscow, graduating with an MA in Monumental-Decorative Painting in 2009. After moving to the UK in 2010, she completed an MA in Culture Policy and Management at City University, London.

Nadia initially gained recognition as a digital artist, including a notable collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum and an interview on Sky News. In 2016, she returned to traditional canvas painting, winning the John Palmer Painting Competition Award and receiving a feature in the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. Most recently, in 2024, she completed the Turps Correspondence Course at Turps Banana Art School.

Nadia is currently based in the Cotswolds, working from her studio at the Painswick Centre, surrounded by a landscape shaped by time, history, growth and quiet transformation. The rhythms of nature and its organic order deeply inform her creative process. The principle of spontaneous pattern formation found throughout the natural world lies at the core of her practice.

‘What I find so inspiring is the dance between order and chaos, abstraction and storytelling, the real and the surreal. In a way, my paintings remind me that the universe itself is creative, building patterns out of chance. I see myself as one small part of that rhythm, translating its language into something I think I understand.’

Nadia’s recent work explores themes of childhood and nostalgia, reinterpreting her own memories through a combination of paint pouring and figurative realism. Her paintings are characterised by organic streams of cellular and vacuolar forms that merge seamlessly with realistic figures, creating a visual language that reflects the compression of time and the fragile, layered process of remembering.