Yulia Pinkusevich

Glowing pink rings ripple outward against a darkened ground. These incandescent halos swell, overlap, and pile onto one another. At first, the painting seems to be of a distant nebula or, perhaps, celebratory fireworks in the night sky.

But this luminous, even elegant scene captures something much darker. Leaning in closer, a viewer can make out the names of cities, handwritten on the canvas. The painting, titled U Can Never Go Home Again (2026) by Oakland-based artist Yulia Pinkusevich, is an uncanny visualization of real-life explosions over Ukraine.

The artist based the work on four years of strike-count data from the Russo-Ukrainian War. “Each concentric circle for that piece is 2,000 explosions,” she explained during a recent conversation. Pinkusevich was born in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city after Kyiv, and emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1990s during the fall of the Soviet Union. “The city I’m from is at the top right [of the work], so you can see that my hometown, where my family is from, has taken a lot of explosions,” she said.

U Can Never Go Home Again is one of a series of new paintings by Pinkusevich currently on view in her solo exhibition “Oblivion Blues” at Kutlesa’s New York gallery. For this exhibition, Pinkusevich homes in on global conflicts—Ukraine, Iran, and Palestine—and gives disquietingly elegant form to the scale of their atrocities. The surfaces of these canvases at times even sparkle, embellished with mica, minerals, and mirrored glass.

The organizing structure of these paintings is the isorithm, a geometric method developed for civil defense to map the effects of an explosion across inhabited terrain. The isorithm appears as warped concentric circles emanating from dark points.

Pinkusevich first encountered the shape in 2018, while working on a collaborative project, Double Vision, at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a former military site in the Bay Area that was part of the Cold War’s Nike missile program. Digging through an archive, she pulled from a wall-to-ceiling stack of manuals a 1950s government booklet that taught soldiers to draw casualty maps by hand, down to sharpening a pencil and twisting it twice on the paper to make the right size dot.

“I thought these maps were really beautiful but speaking about something super horrific,” she said. “Art can be powerful like that, pulling you in two directions, and I couldn’t reconcile it in my mind.” She began making drawings of speculative maps, attempting to imbue her works with empathetic gestures that remind viewers of the scale of these calamities without erasing the allure of the images.

“Beauty and aesthetic seduction are very important for this work, so that you don’t turn away,” she said. “I’m both repulsed by it and attracted to it, and I keep gravitating toward those irreconcilable feelings.”

In past series, Pinkusevich based her isorithmic paintings on Cold War data; in “Oblivion Blues,” she works with information from contemporary conflicts for the first time. She and Northeastern University public-policy professor Mark Henderson built a tool using geographic information systems to generate the maps. For these new maps, Pinkusevich chose to depict blast counts rather than the casualty figures that isorithms have historically depicted.

For the artist, war is not an abstract idea but something ingrained in her childhood. “I remember doing drills under the table and putting on tiny gas masks, and seeing my first-grade friends in these horrible masks with long pipes coming out of their faces,” she said of her childhood in the Soviet Union. “It was horrifying to me and instilled an early memory of the aesthetic of war, and how it’s abstracted.” Her family left for New York weeks before the Soviet Union collapsed, and on the drive to the Moscow airport she saw tank treads stamped deep into the asphalt. “As a child I didn’t process the meaning,” she said, “but as an adult, I realize these were early abstract marks indicating violence, a regime collapse.” Her paintings similarly act as abstractions of real violence.

Another new painting, Iron Sword (2026), focuses on Gaza. It is a vertical, mostly white canvas where red lines encircle strike zones indicating U.S.-funded attacks. “It’s such a small landmass and there’s been so much explosion that the way the data laid out, it became almost a whiteout,” she described. “It becomes a powerful message about the amount of violence people are experiencing on the ground.” While each structure is generated digitally, the paintings are made entirely by hand.

To make these works, Pinkusevich puts down her line work first, gridding and building concentric rings. She then stains into the raw canvas to build a soft, gestural background. “I’m able to bury the lines and pull them back out, either through sanding or burnishing. It’s a push-pull approach,” she explained. She then adds airbrush passages, which impart “a bit of atmospheric glow.” The paintings take months to create. In the final touches, she adds the hand-lettered city names and glass mosaic, like highlights.

In the exhibition, these paintings are on view alongside black-and-white wallpaper based on photographs taken from World War II bomber planes, bombs often still falling. “The historic photos give you some distance to look at history through the lens of today,” said the artist. Pinkusevich hopes that viewers might contemplate the possibility of healing. “Maybe Ukraine too could rebuild, maybe Palestine,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way to look at this devastation through the lens of a future point where we get through this, because in the moment it’s so devastating.”

Throughout the exhibition, Pinkusevich has pinned seed pods to the walls. The seeds look almost like butterfly wings. The pods come from the Indian trumpet tree, which is used in Buddhist temples for ceremonies and garlands and symbolizes healing and renewal. Pinkusevich said that while installing the show, she kept thinking of an often-repeated poetic line: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

“How do you find resilience? I don’t think my work presents answers. I think it poses questions,” she said. “But this was my way to offer a little hope.”