“One day after work I rented 10 axes, pushed them into the ground and shot it with the phone camera. Since then, I have realized what photography can mean.”

Iryna Holtseva (Ukraine, 1994), also known as Eva Holts, is a photographer and writer currently based in Ukraine. The artist completed her studies at Myph School in 2020.

Holt’s pictures lead the observer into a disturbing world close to the Freudian uncanny so beloved of the 900’s Surrealists. Populated by inhumanly posing marionettes, whose fractured and eviscerated bodies create a disconcerting paradox between the sweet childish memory of the doll and their violent use captured by the camera, Eva Holt’s world provides us with a genres representation as raw as the animal limbs we also pictures.

With a successful reprise of feminine objects, which brilliantly twisted angle supplies with a sense of perishability and discomfort, the artist reuses some of the most popular symbols of Pop Culture (such us Halloween, McDonalds, Chupa Chups and many others) and exposes its pessimistic outcome, not only between generations, but also and foremost in human relationships.

The “always nice and friendly barbies”, as the artist describes them, reveals themselves as perfect totems of mankind, in a punctual representation which reminds of other practices before Holts, such as David LaChapelle’s.

Eva Holts already exhibited  at Myph graduates online show (Myph school and gallery) 2020; THE DREAMER International Group Exhibition (LoosenArt) 2020  (Rome, Italy); Online autumn exhibition 2021 “REFLECTIONS” D31 Art Gallery 2021; Festival of Contemporary Art CHANGE 2021 (Mykolaiv, Ukraine); VOGUE WEEK lll EDITION (Boomer Gallery) 2021 (London, England); Vanguard Locals. Festival of Street Cultures and Contemporary Art 2021 (Lviv, Ukraine); Rotterdam Photo Festival 2022 XL (Rotterdam, Netherlands)


More artworks by the artist: