Katerina Varella approaches painting and installation as a form of self-reflection. A way to examine queerness, Cypriot identity, domesticity, and the complexities of belonging in a post-colonial present. Her practice is deeply informed by research, archives, film, and the work of other artists, which she studies closely to understand how meaning takes form through material, composition, and gesture.
Katerinaâs installation draws from personal memory and emotional archetypes. The figures embody both vulnerability and strength, echoing the shifting experience of growing into â and growing away from â the environments that shape us.
In her broader practice, Katerina explores how identity is constantly negotiated between inner experience and external perception. Through careful scenography, she creates spaces where personal narrative opens into shared recognition, inviting viewers to see the echoes of their own stories within hers.
Artist Highlight: â Katerina Varellaâ đď¸â
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â For Best of Graduates 2025, Katerina Varella (Aki ArtEZ Enschede) presents a painting-based practice that explores personal identity, queerness, and the idea of belonging. Her work often starts from her own experiences and feelings, using painting as a way to understand and reflect on complex emotions tied to home, culture, and self.â
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Varellaâs practice brings together themes like queerness, national identity, domestic life, and grief. She paints from a deeply personal place, often connecting her own story to the larger social and political history of Cyprus. Her work looks at the emotional weight of growing up in a divided country, the influence of religion, and the challenges of navigating cultural expectations, especially as a queer woman.â
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â Find out more about the exhibition, the artists, and their available works through the link in my bio.đâ
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Artworks Featured:â
â 1. Artist portrait by Jonathan de Waartâ
2. Katerina Varella, Mourning of the Hypocrite, 2024, Acrylics on canvas, 120 Ă 90 cm, Installation shot by Jonathan de Waartâ
3. â Detail of: Katerina Varella, The Gaze from the gate II, 2024, Watercolour and liquid latex on paper, 100 x 70 cmâ
4. â Detail of: Katerina Varella, Paris is Burning I, 2023, Watercolour on paper, 50 Ă 40 cmâ
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Every detail in Katerina's life-size installation is painted by hand.
The Fine Art graduate built the illusion brushstroke by brushstroke. Wood grain? Painted. Glass on the table? Also painted.
She uses painting to explore parts of herself she doesnât fully understand yet: her queerness, her cultural roots, her relationship with her body.
This large-scale work is very personal, yet it creates space for others too. As viewers walk around the piece, it shifts with every angle. Some recognise their own stories in it. For Katerina, that moment of connection is the true highlight of being an artist.
Want to see more work by our Fine Art grads from AKI Academy of Art & Design? Head to artez.nl/finals.
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I fixed one of the toes later.
'The confrontation' 2025, installation, acrylics on mdf, bolts, wooden panels.
Inspired by the art of scenography, I aimed to reject the set bounds of canvas and paper, applying my painterly sensibilities to mediums where depth, perspective, negative space, scale, movement, and light can be manipulated to a new extent.
Through the installation, I seeked to investigate the relationships of life characters on stage and their inanimate wooden backdrops present. Amidst the interrupted familial conflict, the figures accumulate a character and narrative, and yet, dismantle with each step taken in the space, reducing them to wooden pieces. Thus, the work culminates into explorations of materials through symbolic analysis and their carried context and integrating them with my own storytelling practice.
Mourning of the Hypocrite
In this piece, I visualised the personal aftermath of coming out, in which I was grieved and mourned as if deceased. Sketched in a spurge of despair that could not be vocalised or heard, the construction of my illustrated funeral began, as I massed objects and symbols for my own comprehension on the matter. Rotting, spilling, balancing, and molding, each object presented on the continuous table carried a symbolic context that formulated my grief. Cracked eggs, visualisation of a term used in queer and predominantly trans circles for individuals confronting their identity, Koliva, an Orthodox Christian dish shared for church goers during funerals, wooden blocks struggling to hold balance, personifying the codepended relationship between the mourners and the mourned. These items also act as an amalgamation of my artistic influences and interests throughout my life as a painter, from the momemto mori Dutch still lives with flies that enamoured me as a child, to Sarkis Parajanian's cracked pomegranates that withheld queer subtext through the Soviet regime.
