ABOUT

Born in Paris in 1992, Elisabeth Mironenko-Blankoff is a French artist of Russian-Ukrainian origins.

Her work explores the intersections between reality, imagination, and the sacred, questioning perceptions of time and space. She ventures into hidden and interwoven constructions, forging connections between personal identity and cultural influences.

Her artistic reflection revolves around the blurred boundaries between belief and reality, addressing the inescapable mythologies we construct about ourselves and others. History and Memory, inseparable from their narratives and personal stories, serve both as the starting point and the conclusion of her work. She seeks to infuse reality with a fictional dimension and to render fiction real. Her approach aims to reach a point of questioning where an alternative reading of signs becomes possible, and where space and time can be freely manipulated. The images she brings to life evoke memories, lived or imagined experiences, like an inner exodus.

She attempts to reconstruct the multicultural diversity she stems from while making distinctions, even though her identity cannot be confined within strict borders. This permeability between worlds emerges, even where only otherness seems to exist. Thus, the concept of travel—understood as an encounter with civilizations, textual and visual documentation, and human connection—is central to her work. Her memory is inhabited by frescoes, ruins, icons, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, objects, patterns, music, textures, colors, vibrations, calligraphy, signs, symbols, languages, and both ancient and medieval architecture and imagery.


Artistic Approach

She manipulates materials through evolving experimentation that mimics the passage of time. Her creative process embraces spontaneity, surrender, chance, repetition, emergence, revision, partial or total erasure, palimpsest, chemical reactions, and even destruction. However, this freedom is carefully balanced with technical mastery, ensuring that form and content remain inseparable. Among the many mediums she has explored throughout her life, Elisabeth has, in recent years, chosen to deepen her practice of oil painting, natural pigments, and lime stucco.

The question of the painting’s support has become central to her exploration of materials—plexiglass, coated wood, primed canvas, plasterboard—often crafted or cast to measure, like molding plaster. In her paintings, the viewer witnesses the passage of time, the layering of the past, and the transmission of her beliefs and family heritage. These roots are diverse, unstable, eclectic, and even paradoxical. It is this syncretism that drives Elisabeth’s need to reconcile them.


Background & Influences

Elisabeth is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et Métiers d’Arts (ENSAAMA Olivier-de-Serres) in Paris. After completing a program in Graphic Design for print media and advertising, she pursued a Master’s degree in Art Direction specializing in digital media. She has lived and worked in Paris, Peru, Israel, and the Occitanie region of France.

In 2022, she earned her most recent diploma from the École Européenne de l’Art et des Matières in Albi, specializing in Mural Decoration (natural coatings: clay, lime, plaster).

The daughter of Russian conceptual artist Vladimir Mironenko—of Russian and Cossack heritage—and Raïssa Blankoff, a journalist and production coordinator at Radio France, Elisabeth is also the granddaughter of Jean Blankoff, a Belgian professor and Doctor of Slavic Philology and History, and Goldie Scarr, an American professor of Ukrainian descent. Elisabeth speaks five languages and writes in three alphabets.

Deeply influenced by the world of her grandparents, whose home in Brussels is filled with works and artifacts from Central Asia, the West, and Russia, she was also shaped from childhood by the avant-garde conceptual art movements of the former USSR, of which her father was a part. To this, she adds a personal fascination with naïve, singular, and folk art. Her practice is constantly accompanied by diverse technical experiments, aiming to free the hand and even lose control over acquired skills. This philosophy aligns with her desire to transmit knowledge and teach, particularly to children.

In September 2017, Elisabeth founded Atelier Matis in Occitanie, a space dedicated to teaching visual arts to children, teenagers, and adults through regular classes and workshops. This studio offers a playful and contemporary introduction to a wide range of techniques related to visual arts and crafts. Creativity and experimentation are encouraged through workshops in painting, drawing, photography, mosaics, engraving, bookbinding and publishing, framing, typography, collage, graphic design, and more.


« I am drawn to the enigmatic nature of things and a certain restraint in images. I like that not everything is revealed immediately—or ever completely—with a touch of mysticism. »

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« I enjoy playing with ambiguity in my work, sometimes addressing serious subjects in an unexpected, childlike, naïve, dreamlike, relaxed, decadent, or even provocative manner. »