Ayla Dmyterko's artworks are simultaneously real and imagined, where viewers are invited to coalesce in a syncretic world. Grounded in lineages of painting, her field expands at times to involve moving image, sculpture, dance, material cultures and texts; echoing the noumenal nature of cultural memory. Her painting approach is embodied and intuitive; compositions emerge through layers of concealment and erasure. Following off-modernist u-turns and detours, her works are imbued equally with articulations of the ritualistic, pre-patriarchal, tacit, vernacular and folkloric. This leads her work to disintegrate canonical interpretations of art history and forms of artistic labour.
Her subjects reckon with the possession and dispossession of lands, objects, bodies and skies; derived from both lived and collective experience. In remedial response, she embraces a culture-nature synthesis. To be communed with ecology is to accept and trust in chaos; a continual re-ordering is what is needed to keep us all alive. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform desire and belief, she is interested in ways that artists become mediums.
Dmyterko recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, US and completed ‘Ring Around the Sun & We Rage On,’ presented at Alma Pearl, London, UK. Solo exhibitions have also been presented by Pangée, Montréal, CA (2023 & 2016); Zalucky, Toronto, CA (2022) and Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2021). Her work will be included in the 2026 Drawing Biennial at The Drawing Room, London, UK and has been presented in recent group exhibitions at Alma Pearl, London, UK (2025 & 2024); Pangée, Montréal, CA (2025); Hypha Studios, London, UK (2024); KIRKI Projects, Sifnos, GR (2024) and VITRINE, Basel, CH (2022). Her films have been screened at Pleasure Dome, Toronto, CA (2025); ICA London as part of the London Short Film Festival, UK (2024); Meno Avilys, Vilnius, LI (2024); David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2023) and the CCA Glasgow, UK (2022 & 2021) among others. She completed her BFA in Painting at Concordia University, Montréal and her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art where she was awarded the Graduate Fellowship at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. She has spoken about her work in published interviews and at the Glasgow School of Art and Royal College of Art, London, UK.