Pavlo Fulei: One Artists Battle for Ukraine’s Cultural Soul

The studio is small and heated by a modest electric radiator plugged into the wall. One long window, stretching from the floor to its ceiling, lets in the pale Kyiv light and overlooks a car park of ageing Soviet vehicles. Inside, paintings are stacked against the walls—warm reds, oranges, and ochres—bold and proud. They radiate the heat the minuscule radiator struggles to provide. Pavlo Fulei.

Here, in this modest room tucked inside an old orange-brick building in Kyiv’s Podil district, Pavlo Fulei is fighting a war of identity, memory, and meaning. However, his weapons are not bullets, tanks, or missiles but oil paints and heritage. His battle is symbolic, existing in the abstract: his battlefield, the canvas.

A Childhood Carved in Folk Tradition

Pavlo Fulei was born in 2001 in the mountain village of Holyatyn, in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region. Nestled in the Carpathians, it’s a place where folk traditions live not as performances but as lived experiences—songs passed down at weddings, dances marking the rhythm of life, embroidery woven into identity. His grandfather played the violin at local celebrations; his father played the accordion. For Pavlo, music and creativity, like language, were inherited.

For a while, Pavlo thought music would be his life. But after walking out of music school for the last time with his mother, he spotted a colouring book in a kiosk. An indiscriminate moment that would change everything.

He enrolled at the Adalbert Erdeli Art College and then continued at the Zakarpattia Academy of Arts. There, he found not only technical skill but also purpose. He began to see his work not just as self-expression but as cultural continuity.

Coming to Kyiv, While Others Fled

When Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, many fled Ukraine’s cities. However, Pavlo, possessed by a resolute purpose, meaning and clear vision, moved into one instead.

Uzhhorod—his home region—was too small. Too safe. He felt called to Kyiv, not for adventure or rebellion, but for duty to culture. “I realized I needed to show the world what real Ukrainian culture looks like, when and where it matters most,” he says.

The Kyiv he moved to was tense, unpredictable, fractured—but alive. “It was important to be here, to hold my position, and maintain the strength and existence of my country’s culture,” he says. “Everyone has a job to do. I know what must be done.”

Painting in the Face of Erasure

Fulei’s art is not nostalgic. It is ancestral. His paintings are layered with symbolic memory—the dance steps of village weddings, bees as ecological and cultural metaphors, and embroidered towels from his grandmother’s hands. Every detail speaks to a nation threatened not just by bombs but by erasure.

His studio walls are lined with series-in-progress: “Ukrainian Folk Dances,” “Heritage,” and “Honey Legacy.” Each is a call to remember, a refusal to let history be rewritten.

A Cultural Frontline

When asked if he ever doubts the value of painting in wartime, Pavlo answers with honesty. “There are fears. That maybe it’s not needed. That it won’t be understood. That it’s not enough.” He pauses. “But then I remember—art is a universal language. It doesn’t need translation. It just needs to be true.”

He recalls painting one of his most powerful works, Shidi-Ridi-Dana, on the 444th day of the war. That night, Eurovision aired from Liverpool, and sirens screamed over Kyiv. The painting, which began as something else, transformed into a layered homage to memory, rhythm, and resistance. “The meaning was so deep. For me. For everyone.”

The Red Thread of Memory

There is a wedding carpet on the floor of Pavlo’s studio. His grandmother gave it to him. His entire family danced their first steps as married couples on that carpet. He paints it into his work. Not as an object—but as a living thread that binds generations.

His studio is full of these echoes. A towel embroidered by his grandmother. A bowl of borscht on a canvas rests against the wall with a rendered version of her tablecloth. “Everything means something,” he says. “Even the paint colours. Even the silence between brushstrokes.”

This is not decorative art. It is declarative, and it is dangerous to authoritarian power because it remembers and resists forgetting.

The Larger War: Culture as Nationhood

Ukraine is not simply fighting for borders—it is fighting for existence. Culture has always been the first casualty of imperial ambition. From the suppression of the Ukrainian language to the theft of folk music and art by Russian authorities, the erasure is systematic and strategic.

What Pavlo Fulei does is as political as it is poetic. He does not paint propaganda. He paints truth.

In that sense, he stands in a long tradition of artists who hold the line where armies cannot—painters like Taras Shevchenko, whose works survived the tsar’s censors, or Maria Prymachenko, whose folk art was recently bombed in Ivankiv and rose again in international exhibitions.

Looking Forward

Fulei dreams of larger projects, installations, and public works that can shape cultural memory and shift public opinion. He wants every Ukrainian to fall in love with their traditions again—not as museum pieces, but as living language.

He’s not waiting for grants or galleries to catch up. He’s already doing it.

And when the war ends—and it will—Pavlo Fulei’s canvases will tell a part of the story that no headline ever could. A tale of a young man who stayed. Who painted. Who believed that a song, a dish, a dance—preserved in pigment—was worth defending.