About

Anna Rolskaya is an independent visual artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. Classically trained, she embraces an intuitive, unplanned process that seeks visual balance and quiet poetry. Working from her apartment studio in Lisbon’s Príncipe Real district, Anna draws on the city’s luminous light, gardens, and historic architecture. Influenced by Art Nouveau, she often turns to floral forms as an inexhaustible source for composition, fine detail, and palette. Her paintings are held in private collections worldwide, with many in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Bio

Anna Rolskaya was born in Moscow in 1985, where she received a classical fine art education before studying Communication Design, graduating in 2007. She moved to Portugal in 2015 to complete a Master's at ESAD Matosinhos, and has lived and worked in Lisbon ever since, later deepening her painting practice through a course at Central Saint Martins, London.

Her work is rooted in a physical, intuitive approach to paint — loose, layered, built from disorder toward resolution. Each canvas arrives at a composed, hierarchical surface where the assured gesture carries the full weight of everything beneath it. The recurring themes are refuge, sensation, and the search for form within chaos.

Rolskaya has exhibited across Portugal and internationally, including at Palacete Chagas in Lisbon, and in London and Barcelona. She has shown at the Lisbon Art Fair, Art Fair Portimão, and The Other Art Fair in London. Her work is held in private collections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and across Europe.

Artist statement

Anna Rolskaya's paintings are parallel worlds. They do not depict reality — they offer an escape from it. Dense with layered colour, looping marks, and accumulated form, each work opens into an imaginary landscape the viewer can enter and wander through, losing their bearings in the best possible way.

Her process begins in deliberate chaos. Paint is applied fast and physically, in loose fields and urgent gestures, with no predetermined outcome. Then the canvas is turned, the angle shifted, the eye tricked into surrendering its reference points. From that disorientation, Rolskaya works toward order: each painting resolves into a clear visual hierarchy, a composition where every mark has found its place. The confident, assured stroke that defines her mature work is not the beginning of the process but its destination — earned through layers, reversals, and the willingness to stay inside uncertainty until something true emerges.

Colour is the primary language. Rolskaya does not choose it intellectually. Certain combinations arrive as physical recognition, a resonance in the body before the mind catches up. She follows that signal without compromise.

Rolskaya does not work in series. Each painting is a singular curiosity pursued to its conclusion, which gives her body of work an unusual quality: consistent in feeling, unpredictable in form. Collectors describe living with her paintings as living with a place — somewhere to return to, to get lost in again.

Her work is held in private collections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe. She lives and works in Lisbon.

Purity. Honesty. Disorientation. Refuge. Sensation.

CV

Anna Rolskaya (b. 1985, Moscow). Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal since 2015.

Education
BA in Communication Design, Moscow, 2002–2007
MA in Communication Design, Porto, 2015 - 2017
Online abstract painting course, Central Saint Martins, London

Art fairs
The Other Art Fair, London, March 2025
Lisbon Art Fair, June 2024
Art Fair Portimão, September 2023

Exhibition
Solo show at charity concert by  "Horizonte Musical do Tejo", Palacete Chegas, Lisbon, Portugal
Creating and holding space, group show, Bohio creative, Caldas de Rainha, Portugal, 2026
Connection studio, group show, Lisbon, Portugal, 2025
Group Exhibition, Tavira das Artes Gallery, Tavira, Portugal, 2024
Flores do Cabo, group show, Sintra, Portugal, 2023
Fragmented, group show, London, UK, 2022