Viktoryia Dijk (b. 1992) is a Belarus-born, Rotterdam and London-based painter. Her work carries the layered sensibility of someone who has moved between visual languages and cultural contexts, engaging with themes of identity, transition, and belonging, rendered through a painterly vocabulary shaped by years of rigorous graphic thinking. Recent group exhibitions include Tender Ground (Terrace Gallery, London, 2025) and CHISMATA (Greatorex Street Gallery, London, 2025). She holds a BA in Graphic Design from the State College of Art, Minsk (2012), a BA in Graphic Design from KABK, The Hague (2016), and completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2025).
She paints on the floor, in dry pigments and rabbit skin glue on unprimed linen — a surface chosen because it absorbs, breathes, and resists in its own way. In this conversation, she talks about what’s non-negotiable in her process, what surprises her every few months, and what she wants you to walk out of the room carrying.
Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something — and did you understand at the time what it was actually about?
Playing with art materials is my earliest memory of curiosity towards creating. I didn’t understand the significance of it then, how it would connect to everything I make now, but I remember one thing clearly: the will to use it. To pick it up and do something with it. That impulse, I think, was already the whole story.
Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a conversation — and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?
It lives in a combination of all things — a feeling, a colour, a conversation, a space. What I’ve come to understand is that when I go deeper into one of them, the others start to become clearer. They illuminate each other. So I don’t try to hold on to all of it at once — I follow whichever thread feels most alive, and the rest tends to find its way.