What We Are Taught to Hide
Helena Bunina’s work returns again and again to the things we are taught to suppress: vulnerability, contradiction, failure, anger, desire, and the parts of ourselves that do not fit neatly within social expectations. Across Fragile Tension, ABSURD, and her more personal explorations of memory, gestures of care can become acts of control, humor can expose uncomfortable truths, and familiar cultural promises begin to unravel. Her vivid surfaces do not resolve these tensions so much as hold them in view. What emerges is a practice shaped by the gradual refusal to remain silent or polished, and by a growing willingness to let imperfection, memory, and lived experience become visible on their own terms.
From ArtVanguard Editorial Team
Portrait of Helena Bunina
Artist Biography
Helena Bunina is a Ukrainian contemporary artist and muralist based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, mixed media, and large-scale mural art, exploring vulnerability, instinct, identity, emotional resilience, memory, and transformation through a visual language rooted in neo-pop aesthetics and emotional symbolism.
Drawing from personal experience, street culture, and the expressive power of color, Bunina creates vibrant works that balance playful imagery with psychological depth. Her ongoing bodies of work include Fragile Tension and ABSURD, exploring themes of human connection, inner conflict, freedom, memory, and personal transformation.
Bunina’s work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and is featured on international art platforms, including Artsy, Singulart, and Saatchi Art. Her practice encompasses gallery exhibitions, public and private commissions, and large-scale murals, connecting contemporary art with public spaces, communities, and everyday environments.
Her work has been featured in art publications and artist-focused media, with additional publications and artist interviews forthcoming in 2026. Through these platforms, Bunina continues to expand the international visibility of her artistic practice.
Bunina is a member of the National Association of Artists and Sculptors of Ukraine (NAAS), maintaining a longstanding connection with the Ukrainian artistic community. In 2026, after relocating to Las Vegas, she became a member of the Las Vegas Artists’ Guild (LVAG), further engaging with the local contemporary art community.
In addition to her studio practice, Bunina has completed public and private mural commissions in Chicago for restaurants, commercial spaces, and private collectors. Her practice continues to develop at the intersection of contemporary painting, symbolic storytelling, and public art.
Website: www.helenabunina.com
Instagram: @Bunina_arts
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in the belief that emotions connect us more deeply than words. Through painting, mixed media, and mural art, I explore themes of memory, resilience, hope, vulnerability, and personal transformation.
I am inspired by the invisible stories that people carry within themselves. Using symbolism, expressive color, and layered visual imagery, I create works that reflect emotional states and the complexities of human experience. Animals, human figures, and recurring symbols frequently appear throughout my practice as metaphors for freedom, strength, growth, and change.
Whether working on a canvas in the studio or creating a large-scale mural in a public space, I approach each piece as an opportunity for dialogue. Public art allows me to engage directly with people, transforming everyday environments into places of connection, inspiration, and reflection. My studio practice serves the same purpose: to create images that encourage viewers to pause, feel, and recognize a part of their own story within the work.
Rather than offering answers, I seek to create moments of recognition, those rare instances when an image, symbol, or color awakens a memory, an emotion, or a feeling that cannot be fully expressed through words.
For me, art is not only a form of self-expression but also a way of building human connection through shared emotions, stories, and experiences. Through my work, I strive to remind viewers of the power of imagination, the possibility of transformation, and the universal emotions that connect us all.
Interview with Helena Bunina
Q1. You were born in Ukraine, and your artistic life has since unfolded across different cultural and geographic contexts before bringing you to Las Vegas. Looking back, what early experiences, including those outside of art, do you now recognize as having shaped the emotional vocabulary of your work?
I grew up in a small town where many of the things that seemed completely normal to people around me always felt strange to me. I often felt like I was in the wrong place. I struggled with the mentality around me, with school, and with the expectations that were placed on me from a very young age.
I was a creative, free-spirited person, but I didn't feel like I was allowed to express myself freely. I was constantly being told to fit into someone else's expectations.
My parents were called to school so often that it became almost routine. I had a rebellious personality, and I think it was difficult for my parents because I was constantly pushing against the boundaries that were being placed around me.
At sixteen, I left my hometown and moved to Poland. I am incredibly grateful that my parents supported my desire to leave, because I already knew that I wanted something different from the life I saw around me. Leaving at sixteen and beginning an independent life became one of the experiences that shaped me the most. I realized that if I wanted something more, I had to work toward it myself.
There was also a culture of silence around me. We were taught not to say too much, not to offend anyone, and not to make certain things public. There were personal experiences and painful things from my childhood that I wasn't ready or allowed to talk about at the time. Some of them stayed with me for a very long time and changed the way I experienced the world.
Today, we have much more freedom to speak openly about difficult experiences, but where I grew up, it often felt like you had to keep your voice down so no one would hear you.
I think all of this became part of the emotional language of my work. My experiences with control, silence, judgment, and the desire for freedom continue to appear in my paintings, sometimes directly and sometimes in ways I only recognize much later.
Q2. You are now based in Las Vegas, a city built around spectacle, performance, fantasy, and constructed identities. Your recent work is also increasingly concerned with masks, social roles, appearances, and absurdity. Has living in Las Vegas changed the way you think about the distance between what people present outwardly and what they experience internally?
I think this question goes beyond Las Vegas. Of course, moving to Las Vegas changed me. It showed me a much more vivid version of the world, especially the nightlife and the culture of spectacle. Las Vegas always felt to me like a place where people could step outside the rules and expectations that had been placed on them and show a different version of themselves. That is one of the things I love about this city.
But my paintings are not really about Las Vegas alone. I think they speak more broadly about the way we live today.
We are constantly surrounded by images of other people's lives, especially through social media. We are shown carefully constructed versions of reality—people who appear happier, richer, more beautiful, more successful, and more confident than they may actually feel. These images can create a distorted idea of what life is supposed to look like, especially for younger people who are still developing their understanding of themselves and the world.
For me, one of the biggest problems is that sincerity is becoming less visible. Kindness and honesty can sometimes seem almost extraordinary, when they should simply be normal human qualities.
I think people are becoming more disconnected from their real emotions, and life itself has become more complicated and demanding. My work reflects that distance between what we show on the outside and what may actually be happening underneath.
Q3. In the Fragile Tension series, physical gestures often seem emotionally ambiguous: a hand may support, restrain, protect, manipulate, or possess at the same time. I am interested in that ambiguity. Is “holding” something you think about as both an act of care and an exercise of control?
You really caught me with this series because Fragile Tension is so ambiguous. You understood it in a way that is very close to what I feel when I look at these works.
For me, the hand is often connected to control. Sometimes it represents something external that controls us, but sometimes it represents the control we create ourselves. It can also be about choice, because control and freedom are often connected.
The image of a hand holding a little girl like a theatrical puppet or a clown, for example, connects very strongly to the first questions you asked me. It brings me back to ideas of control, expectations, and the feeling of being shaped by something outside yourself.
Each painting has its own emotional story, and I could probably talk about each one separately. But overall, I think the series exists somewhere between control and choice. We may feel that someone else is controlling us, but we also have to ask ourselves how much control we allow, accept, or even create ourselves.
That tension between wanting to be free and feeling controlled is something I have experienced throughout my life, and I think that is why this series continues to feel so personal to me.
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Helena Bunina, Protected, 2026. Acrylic, aerosol paint, and varnish on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Helena Bunina, A Moment of Life, 2024. Acrylic, aerosol paint, and varnish on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Q4. Your practice moves between relatively intimate studio paintings and large-scale murals. Does painting for a public space require a different kind of listening than painting alone in the studio?
Yes, absolutely. When you work on a mural, you are constantly thinking about what other people want to see and how they might react to the image. If it is a commissioned project, you are usually creating something for another person, so you have to listen to their ideas, understand what they want, and then bring your own artistic suggestions into the process.
Painting alone in my studio is completely different.
When I am alone with a canvas, I can almost turn off my thoughts. It becomes a pure flow. It feels like a ray of sunlight suddenly hits the top of your head, and you forget about time, everything around you, and even yourself. You simply transfer whatever is happening inside you onto the canvas.
That is probably when I feel the most free as an artist.
Q5. There is a very specific kind of humor in the ABSURD series. It can be playful, awkward, and sometimes uncomfortable. What makes something feel “absurd” to you? Is it the situation itself, or the fact that we have become so used to certain behaviors and values that we no longer notice how strange they are?
I really love the way you have structured these questions because when I showed my work to curators from my home country, sometimes the response was simply, "Oh, that's cool," and that was it.
But you see much deeper meanings and subtexts in the work, including the strange things that actually exist in everyday life.
For me, ABSURD: Everything Is Fine is about contrast. It can be a contrast between different mentalities and cultures, for example between my experience in Ukraine and my experience in America. It can also be the contrast between things that one person considers completely normal and things that another person might consider taboo.
That space between those two perspectives is where a lot of my work exists.
I don't need every viewer to understand a painting in exactly the way I intended. I want the work to touch something deeper in each person and leave a trace.
For me, that is much more important than someone simply looking at it and saying, "Oh, that's cool."
Helena Bunina, Luxurious Luxury, 2026. Oil and texture paste on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Helena Bunina, Fuck Your Speed, 2026. Oil and texture paste on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Q6. In Biggest Fans, text becomes a central part of the image. What made you want to build the work around this particular phrase?
Biggest Fans is probably one of the most personal works in the series.
The phrase comes from something I have experienced many times: people often begin to believe in you only after you have already achieved something. Once you succeed, they suddenly say, "I always believed in you. I always knew you could do it."
But we both know that is not always true.
At the beginning of your journey, when you are still trying, making mistakes, and doubting yourself, there may be no one standing beside you. Sometimes there is only you and the belief that you can make it, despite everyone and everything around you.
That is what Biggest Fans is about for me—the people who become your loudest supporters after you have already proven yourself, and the importance of continuing to believe in yourself before anyone else does.
Helena Bunina, Biggest Fans, 2026. Oil and texture paste on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Q7. You are currently developing PADIK: Unlocked Memories as a new sub-series within ABSURD. Can you give us a little preview of the project and what we can look forward to?
PADIK: Unlocked Memories is much more personal. While ABSURD: Everything Is Fine looks at broader situations and social behavior, PADIK focuses on very specific memories from my childhood.
The project takes me back to the old apartment entrances where I grew up. They were dark, dirty, worn-out Soviet spaces, but inside those spaces there were also very bright, innocent, and genuine moments.
There is a painting I especially love that shows two boys sitting together and playing guitar. It is about those moments when something is going wrong at home, you have an argument with your parents, and instead of staying inside, you go downstairs with a friend. You talk about what happened, play guitar, and maybe even start smoking cigarettes in the entrance because you are trying to feel older than you actually are.
Another painting shows two little girls who have spread a blanket out and are playing with dolls.
These are very small moments from childhood, but they stayed deep inside me. PADIK: Unlocked Memories is about those memories—the warm, intimate moments that existed inside dark, dirty entrances.
In a difficult childhood, those little moments were sometimes the things that kept you going.
Q8. In Fairytale Idiot, the white horse suggests something almost heroic or fairytale-like, while the figure and setting feel much more uncertain. How did this image come together for you?
From childhood, girls especially are often given this fairy tale: a real prince will come on a white horse, rescue the princess, and take her into a beautiful life where they will live happily ever after.
But real life is not always like that.
In my painting, the horse actually remains a beautiful, noble white horse. The problem is the person riding it. Instead of a prince, we get a kind of fairytale idiot—a clown wearing a mask who is very far from the perfect hero we were promised.
Of course, I am not saying that every relationship or every man is like this. It is more about the expectations we are given and the gap between those expectations and reality.
We grow up believing that everything will eventually work out like a fairy tale, but real family life and real relationships are much more complicated. Sometimes the person who arrives looking like the hero turns out to be completely different from the character we imagined.
That contrast between the fantasy and the reality is what created Fairytale Idiot.
Helena Bunina, Fairytale Idiot, 2026. Oil and texture paste on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Q9. Tattooing, mural painting, and studio painting all ask you to think about surfaces very differently. Looking back, do you see them as separate chapters of your life, or as parts of the same visual language?
I think they are very different experiences.
With tattooing, you are afraid to make a mistake because the work is going onto someone's body and becoming part of them. You have to rely on your skills and make very precise decisions because it is something that stays with the person.
Murals are similar in a different way because they are public. You receive criticism from many different people, and you have to think about how the work will exist in a shared space.
A painting feels much more personal and alive to me. When I am working alone in the studio, I can allow myself not to be perfect. I can follow what I feel instead of trying to satisfy someone else's expectations.
Of course, there is still responsibility in a painting, but it is a different kind of responsibility—the responsibility of being honest with yourself and allowing the work to remain imperfect.
Q10. If we opened the camera roll on your phone right now, what kinds of images would appear again and again—and which of them would probably make no sense to anyone except you?
My phone is basically a huge storage room for my entire life. It's almost impossible to find anything in there, but somehow everything is there.
The most personal things are probably the photographs of my family. There are so many of them, and I know they probably wouldn't mean much to anyone else, but they mean a lot to me. My family is such an important part of my life, so those photographs are almost like little pieces of my personal history.
I also screenshot absolutely everything—random things I see, information I want to remember, ideas, visual references, things I might need later. And then, honestly, I often never look at those screenshots again.
So I think my camera roll is basically my personal diary, just a very chaotic one. It has family photos, random screenshots, visual references, little moments from everyday life, and things that probably make absolutely no sense to anyone else.
And maybe that is exactly what I like about it. It isn't organized or curated. It's simply a collection of everything that caught my attention or mattered to me at some point.
Q11. Looking ahead, what are you most curious to explore next, whether in subject matter, materials, scale, or a direction you have not tried before?
I constantly have a stream of ideas about what I want to create and where I want to go next. I want to keep developing my painting and growing as an artist. Murals will definitely remain an important part of my life, but with my paintings, I want to go deeper into more personal stories.
I am especially drawn to continuing to explore absurdity and the themes that naturally emerge from my life and experiences. I also want to continue developing the Fragile Tension series and exploring the imagery of hands. I don't think this series will end anytime soon. It is very close to me and continues to evolve as I do.
I also think that whatever happens in my life now will eventually leave a trace in my work, just as my childhood experiences did. So I see these series as something that will continue growing and changing with me for a very long time.
And yes, I want to explore something else too: I want to become more visible.
For a long time, I hid my art and was afraid to show too much of myself because I was afraid of being judged or criticized. I don't feel that way anymore. I have accepted that I am not a perfect person, that my work will have imperfections, that not everyone will understand me, and that I don't need everyone to like me.
Right now, I feel like I am finally ready to show those imperfections instead of hiding them.
This is the moment when I want to step forward and introduce myself to the world as I am.
Helena Bunina, Strange Lady Across, 2026. Oil and texture paste on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
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Helena Bunina, Held Freedom, 2026. Acrylic, aerosol paint, and varnish on canvas, 20 × 20 in.
Q12. What is a piece of advice about art or life that has stayed with you, and that you would like to share with fellow artists or creators?
I think life has taught me to accept my imperfections and even embrace them, because the world is imperfect, and so are we. Sometimes, the things we see as our weaknesses can actually become our strengths.
I've learned not to hide behind a perfectly polished image and to allow myself to make mistakes. We have to accept that mistakes can sometimes be painful and can leave us with difficult memories, but they also become part of our journey.
And I think the most important thing is to create and let your work speak for you. It doesn't matter if everyone understands you or accepts you right away. If you are creating something you honestly believe in, you will eventually find your audience.
If people don't understand you in your small town, or if you aren't accepted even in your own country, that doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. There are so many places in the world where you can be understood, accepted, and supported.
Sometimes you simply have to find your place. A place where you don't have to become someone else in order to be accepted. A place where you can be yourself, keep creating, and gradually learn to accept yourself.
So I think that is what I would say to other artists: Don't try to be perfect. Allow yourself to be real. Your imperfections can become part of your art—and part of your strength.