ARTWORKS

Meditations From the Roads began in the summer of 2023, after more than a year of long drives between Kyiv and the places in the west of Ukraine and abroad where Wodeman frequently went to meet his family, who had temporarily left Kyiv after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The road became a space of movement between separation and reunion, anticipation and reflection, silence and inner conversation.

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From the beginning the series moved beyond the literal image of the road. It became connected to listening, reading, memory, and the strange mental state that appears during hours of driving. Literature, podcasts, fragments of thought, and the aftertaste of books such as Hesse’s Magister Ludi, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Kafka’s The Castle gradually entered the paintings. In these works, the road is no longer a place of travel, but a space where images, emotions, and ideas appear, disappear, and return.

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Works from Meditations From the Roads were presented in the group exhibitions Sugar-Free (2024) and Urban Muse (2025) in New York, Transcendence - Artists of Ukraine (2024) in San Francisco, Faces of Silence (2025) in Chicago, and Portrait of the Unknown One (2025) in Ivano-Frankivsk. Read more in the related blog post, and see more about these exhibitions on the Exhibitions page.