Exploring culture and identity in Maru Jarockyj’s “Ukrainian DNA”

Figures are distilled into simple circles and rectangles, but from the chaos of shapes emerge hidden stories.

Solomiya Sywak
October 15, 2025

Maru Jarockyj is an artist, but also an architect, as becomes evident as you wander through her exhibition at Chatswood Art Space.

The walls are lined with acrylic panels, alive with intersecting diagonals and bursts of bold reds, blues and yellows that leap from the canvas.

Figures are distilled into simple circles and rectangles, but from the chaos shapes materialise, like a completed jigsaw revealing hidden stories from the painter’s Ukrainian homeland. Floral headpieces. Embroidered patterns. Church arches.

Precision anchors the geometry; sharp lines slice through grids of vivid colour, particularly in works such as Bandury. This large, single-panel acrylic painting depicts a row of bandury, a 68-string traditional instrument.

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Lined up as if outside a classroom, ready to be picked up for music lessons after Ukrainian Saturday school, each instrument is imbued with its own character. The subtle variations in colour and line invite viewers to imagine the different hands learning to play them.

Religion and history

The exhibition includes a cycle of five Madonna icon prints inspired by Byzantine religious imagery. Before their presentation in Ukrainian DNA they were shown in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the historic cave monastery in Kyiv.

Each depiction traces one of Ukraine’s most tragic chapters, from the Holodomor famine of the 1930s to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of the 1980s, and most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Ukrainian-Australian community

The opening celebration of the exhibition was filled with warmth and support, not only for the artist, but for the wider Ukrainian-Australian community. In her opening remarks, Jarockyj reflected on the importance of art as a means of fostering connection within multicultural communities, drawing a parallel between the strong lines in her paintings and the invisible lines that bind people together.

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Ukrainian DNA bridges continents, generations and identities. Through her cubist renderings Jarockyj reimagines the fragments of diaspora as something whole: a living testament to the enduring pulse of Ukrainian culture.

Ukrainian DNA continues at the Chatswood Concourse Art Space until October 19.