Liza Sivakova

Born in 1997 in Russia, Liza Sivakova lives and works between Paris and Dresden. Her practice investigates the visual mechanisms through whichpower is constructed, legitimised, and remembered. Combining archival imagery, found photographs, collage, and her own materials, she creates multilayered, transhistorical paintings in which historical realities and fiction converge. By appropriating and reconfiguring familiar visual languages, symbols, and historical references, her work examines how images shape political narratives, collective perception, and systems of authority.
 
Educated at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, Sivakova continued her artistic development at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Growing up in post-Soviet Russia and witnessing the gradual consolidation of an authoritarian regime profoundly shaped Sivakova’s artistic practice. Rather than depicting historical events, her paintings explore the visual strategies through which political authority is constructed, normalised and sustained, as well as the ways that these mechanisms permeate everyday life. Moving between personal experience and collective history, her work questions how ideology, patriarchal structures, and inherited images continue to influence contemporary society.
 
Working primarily in oil painting, Sivakova develops her compositions through an extensive process of collecting, researching, and reassemblingarchival material. Historical figures frequently appear alongside vividly coloured contemporary elements, allowing different temporalities tocoexist within a single pictorial space. Through recurring symbols, layered imagery, and deliberate shifts between monochrome and colour,her paintings resist linear narratives and instead invite multiple readings, deconstructing and blurring the boundaries between documentation, memory and fiction.
 
Her work is held in the collections of the Städtische Galerie Dresden, the STRABAG Art Collection, and the Kunstsammlung des Bodenseekreises. She was selected for the Fresh A.I.R. Scholarship Programme of Stiftung Berliner Leben (2027), received the Förderpreis des Bodenseekreises(2026) and the First Prize of the Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe (2024), and was featured by ARTE in 2024. Recent exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Schloss Britz (Berlin) and multiple exhibitions in Germany.
 
 
 
MORE INFORMATION:
// Biography
 
EXHIBITION:
// Under the Chandelier (10/09-31/10/26 | Brussels)