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.
By Kathleen Nora White
