Olya Avstreyh is a Russian-born, Tel Aviv-based visual artist, whose dramatic expressionistic paintings convey a sense of confusion about herself and modern life. Driven by this frustration, Olya explores the human condition through somewhat grotesque images of people caught in an off-guard moment, when the emotions they normally keep hidden come to the surface. The vulnerability of her subjects, a feeling of anxiety in the face of the many uncertainties of human existence and her own experiences of womanhood and immigration, both traumatic and otherwise, are some of the central themes in Olya’s work. Having made international headlines with her pandemic-era series of contemporary nudes, the artist has focused on a spectrum of ‘situations’ from loneliness and estrangement to sensual indulgence and learning to accept your own body.