Iryna Sytnyk’s Intellectual Art as a Form of Artistic Self-Therapy

The article offers a comprehensive analysis of the work of Iryna Sytnyk—a Ukrainian artist, cultural scholar, art historian, and educator whose multifaceted activity represents a new dimension of contemporary Ukrainian visual art: the transformation of a professional artist into an art researcher, and vice versa. This issue has been scarcely examined in Ukrainian cultural studies and art history, and the causes of such shifts remain unexplored. The authors substantiate the emergence of the phenomenon of “intellectual art” as a specific artistic practice developed at the intersection of professional artistic and analytical research competencies. The focus is placed on the interdisciplinary nature of Sytnyk’s creative method, which integrates academic training in painting with cultural studies methodology and philosophical reflection. The article highlights the interpretation of the artist’s creative activity through the concept of “artistic self-therapy,” introduced by the authors to designate a process in which the act of creation becomes a form of psychological stabilization and a strategy for overcoming the traumatic experience of war. It is demonstrated that Sytnyk’s painting—emotionally open and oriented toward humane, recognizable imagery—constructs an alternative mode of experiencing and transforming wartime reality, offering the viewer a therapeutic space of empathy. Based on the analysis of the artist’s key works from 2018–2025, the article outlines her stylistic development, including the interaction between figurative and experimental approaches, the use of impasto techniques, symbolic imagery, and biographical motifs. Consequently, the study provides the first systematic scholarly interpretation of Iryna Sytnyk’s oeuvre in the context of contemporary sociocultural transformations and lays conceptual foundations for further research into intellectual art and artistic self-therapy as phenomena of the latest Ukrainian artistic practice.