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Taya Naumovich is a Russian-born artist currently living and working in Philadelphia. Through independent exploration and sustained studio practice, she has developed a distinct visual language that blends emotional intuition with experimental mark-making. Her paintings often inhabit dream-like, atmospheric spaces—evoking memory, sensation, and the unseen interplay between light, color, and presence.
Drawing from both classical references and personal mythologies, Naumovich’s work explores transformation, vulnerability, and the quiet thresholds between embodiment and disappearance. Her layered abstractions suggest figures in flux—ghostly forms that emerge and dissolve, inviting the viewer into states of emotional and perceptual transition.
Naumovich’s work has been featured in group exhibitions across the United States. Recent exhibitions include Forbidden Fruit at Piano Craft Gallery (Boston, MA, 2021), Cosmologic at Curiouser & Curiouser (Kansas City, 2023), Gathered in the Stretching Now at Heaven Gallery (Chicago, 2024), and The Collective II at Visionary Projects (New York, NY, 2024).
Artist Statement My work traces the quiet transitions between memory, feeling, and form.I work in oil and watercolor, building figures that emerge like breath—hovering between substance and dissolution. Often angelic or mythic in form, these presences arrive through painterly intuition, gestural mark-making, and emotional resonance rather than premeditated narrative.
I was born and raised in Russia, where I was surrounded by rich visual traditions—icons, pageantry, folklore, and classical painting. At 22, I immigrated alone to the United States, first settling in Philadelphia and eventually making my way to New York. That experience of dislocation and reinvention—carrying a history inside a new world—has deeply shaped my work. I often return to themes of fragility, protection, and internal metamorphosis. The figures in my paintings appear suspended between worlds, much as I have often felt—between past and future, language and silence, rootedness and change.
Many of my paintings begin with a quiet, emotional charge—often sparked by historical images I return to: Rubens, Fragonard, Bouguereau, and others who painted putti and angels caught mid-glow. Their soft, curly-haired forms resemble my daughter when she was two or three years old—an uncanny resemblance that still takes my breath away. When I paint angel-like figures, they are not portraits, but emotional vessels: memories of her, of sweetness passing, of love that hovers in the air long after the moment.
Looking at paintings I love is not just reference—it’s ritual. The emotional atmosphere of a Baroque sky or the flicker of Rococo silk stirs something visceral. When I paint, I reach for that sensation—of beauty that feels both holy and fleeting. Across works like Touch Me Softly and Learning to Stay, serpents, folds, and spectral silhouettes drift through glowing fields. These figures don’t explain; they invite. They hold space for stillness inside turbulence, tenderness inside complexity.
For me, painting is a form of return: to vision, to memory, to love. My practice lives in the tension between rupture and grace. Between the moment you let go—and the one where you’re caught by something unseen.
I was born and raised in Russia, where I was surrounded by rich visual traditions—icons, pageantry, folklore, and classical painting. At 22, I immigrated alone to the United States, first settling in Philadelphia and eventually making my way to New York. That experience of dislocation and reinvention—carrying a history inside a new world—has deeply shaped my work. I often return to themes of fragility, protection, and internal metamorphosis. The figures in my paintings appear suspended between worlds, much as I have often felt—between past and future, language and silence, rootedness and change.
Many of my paintings begin with a quiet, emotional charge—often sparked by historical images I return to: Rubens, Fragonard, Bouguereau, and others who painted putti and angels caught mid-glow. Their soft, curly-haired forms resemble my daughter when she was two or three years old—an uncanny resemblance that still takes my breath away. When I paint angel-like figures, they are not portraits, but emotional vessels: memories of her, of sweetness passing, of love that hovers in the air long after the moment.
Looking at paintings I love is not just reference—it’s ritual. The emotional atmosphere of a Baroque sky or the flicker of Rococo silk stirs something visceral. When I paint, I reach for that sensation—of beauty that feels both holy and fleeting. Across works like Touch Me Softly and Learning to Stay, serpents, folds, and spectral silhouettes drift through glowing fields. These figures don’t explain; they invite. They hold space for stillness inside turbulence, tenderness inside complexity.
For me, painting is a form of return: to vision, to memory, to love. My practice lives in the tension between rupture and grace. Between the moment you let go—and the one where you’re caught by something unseen.