Russian-born artist Maya Golyshkina has built a cult following for her unexpected images, featuring herself interacting with oversized objects handcrafted from everyday items such as newspaper, body paint and cracked eggs. Deceptively naive and expertly amateurish, her work is enough to make the viewer’s own imagination run wild. She tells writer Kyle MacNeill why she would rather let her art do the talking.
Over the last few years, Maya Golyshkina’s work has built a cult following, enjoying an instant distinctiveness. She crafts props from everyday materials (newspaper, bedding, plastic bags, cracked eggs) and combines them with hand-painted sets, before placing herself—often wearing one of these components—at the center of the image, posing with a detached expression. Maya Golyshkina is many things depending on where her imagination takes her—a toilet paper nurse, a glum cardboard birthday cake, a scribbled squirt of toothpaste—but she’s always, very much, herself.
“Growing up in Russia and struggling to fit into society’s norms was a challenging experience,” she says, “but the restrictions I faced greatly expanded my creative perspective and helped shape who I am now. It was a tough journey, full of valuable lessons, and I’ve translated that into my art.”
After school, she started out creatively behind the camera, but soon found it wasn’t stimulating enough to capture other subjects and was disillusioned by contemporary photography. Then, the pandemic hit, but lockdown unlocked even more opportunities for the young artist. Marc Jacobs and his team discovered Golyshkina while scrolling through social media and tasked her with creating a “quarantine-friendly project” around the label’s accessories (she used corn puffs to create a matching top and hat).
“It was my superstar chance,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t really know about any magazines or fashion or art. I just did everything myself at home locked in my room, and it was very simple. But people were scrolling, reposting, sharing, sharing, sharing,” she remembers. In 2020, she recreated that year’s most memorable Autumn/Winter runway looks out of paper, cardboard, food wrap (and more) in an exclusive editorial for THE FACE, which dominoed into features in Vogue, More or Less and others, as well as playful collaborations with the likes of Balenciaga, Maison Margiela and More Joy.
In 2022, Golyshkina left for London, feeling like she had outgrown Moscow. Since then, she’s become embedded in the capital’s art scene, showing her self-portraits in Seventeen Gallery and Moosey London. But although she hatched plans to leave Russia as soon as she began creating, a sense of her homeland’s humor has endured. “Russians always say that, because of poverty, the only thing we can do about it is to laugh. So my [original] art statement was that the best way to get rid of pain is to laugh at it,” she says.
The artist intentionally embraces a rough, unrefined aesthetic in her work: crafting costumes from inexpensive materials, using bold, messy brushstrokes, and leaving visible traces of Photoshop in her photos. While flawless images dominate social media, Golyskina deliberately rejects this ideal. She challenges the polished, curated life of Instagram by normalizing what’s often excluded, whether it’s dressing in slime or smearing ketchup on her face.
The resulting work is a kind of magic trick, the inexpensive transformed into the expansive, trash turned into treasure. Her practice is symptomatic of an incurable curiosity and an authentic weirdness—the only thing fabricated about Golyshkina are her costumes. This irreverence taps into the reverberating neo-absurdity of our times; we increasingly want to get lost in surreal imagery. “People really crave something different,” she says. But brain rot is not the answer. “We have a lot of content nowadays, but the main paradox is most of it is just bullshit.”
Golyshkina has been labelled as a “sustainable” artist due to her use of everyday materials. But it’s more economical than environmental. “I never had a budget. I use the same things again and again, because why would I waste it?” she says. Either way, her thrifty approach is refreshingly accessible.
But something that is, for the most part, inimitable, is herself. Golyshkina’s likeness is intrinsic to her work; she uses her body and contorts her costumes around it. “I know I’m not going to use anyone else’s body for my ideas. I want to concentrate on my own,” she says.
“I use my body as both a tool and a canvas to show that it’s not just about being sexy or pleasing—it's about being whatever I want it to be. I live in my own fantasy world, one that I try to recreate and share with others,” she continues. “My goal is to help people break free from societal norms and their own bubbles. It can be draining, and I need to separate my personal life from the art I create. At times, I feel like myself and the artist Maya are two completely different people. To recharge, I have to disconnect and take a break.”
The path of art can be complicated and challenging at times, but giving up is not the answer. It’s okay to have doubts and question yourself constantly—taking breaks is part of the process. After all, it’s just life, I suppose.
Maya Golyshinka’s solo exhibition will run until April 29 2025 at Galerie Nicola von Senger in Zürich.
