Anna Lugovska

Studio portrait: Callum Crawford

Anna Lugovska is a visual artist based between Basel and London.

Her practice explores the fragile intersections between individual and collective memory, examining how historical contexts, cross-cultural encounters and global influences shape contemporary identity. Working primarily with oil on canvas and wood, she investigates time, visibility and physical presence as shifting and unstable conditions.

Observing anonymous crowds, particularly within large cities, Lugovska constructs images that function as fleeting glimpses, moments suspended between movement and stillness. Figures emerge through raindrops, window reflections, shadows and intense light, creating fragmented visual portals that dissolve spatial certainty. While faces remain calm and emotionally unreadable, functioning as ‘social masks’, hands become the primary site of expression, revealing individuality and vulnerability. Rather than being treated as passive or purely functional elements, hands are given a voice, acting as active carriers of memory and unfiltered emotion.

Her paintings merge reality and imagination, allowing images to exist across multiple dimensions. Objects and figures oscillate between concrete forms, memories and fleeting ideas, questioning the stability of representation and perception.

@All images courtesy of Anna Lugovska.