This past season, INSTITUT hosted its first artist residency in July, bringing live painting into the space alongside its weekly performances. Artist Agata Ivanna Pogorelsky, known as Ivanna LunAzul, painted in real time as musicians and performers took the stage, responding to the sound, movement and atmosphere of each night.
The result is a series of seven paintings connected to five performances — from Ukrainian folk dance and Judeo-Spanish cello looping to Chilean psych-folk, electronic music and punk. Together, they form a visual record of INSTITUT’s pilot season and the music that filled the room.
Painting the Energy will be on view at St. Volodymyr Institute from November 4 to December 4, 2026. Selected works from the exhibition are available for purchase.
About Ivanna LunAzul
Ivanna LunAzul is a Barcelona-based multidisciplinary artist with Argentinian and Ukrainian roots whose practice spans painting, photography and performance. With a background in art therapy, visual arts, and more than a decade of live painting experience, her live work is intuitive: rather than starting with a predetermined composition, she responds to the music, performers, audience, and atmosphere around her—a process she describes simply as “painting the energy.”
Innocence
Painted to Kryva Kosa
The first work of the residency began with movement.
Kryva Kosa brought Ukrainian folk dance into INSTITUT, combining live music with an open dance social and instruction. Watching dancers repeatedly move through circular formations, LunAzul began translating those shapes onto the canvas.
The circles became the foundation of Innocence. Working with Soviet-era magazines found in the space, she also incorporated a photograph of a child wearing flowers, an image she encountered instinctively while painting and immediately felt belonged in the composition.
SOLD
Abuela
Painted to Toledano Music
For Abuela, the starting point was Toledano's music, the project of Moroccan-Canadian composer Blanche Israël.
The performance layered cello, looping, Judeo-Spanish song and archival family recordings. At one point, the audience heard a voice message from Israël’s grandmother — part of a larger musical exploration of family, inheritance, and identity.
LunAzul did not know the full story while she was painting. Yet an older woman appeared at the centre of the work. She stands at a doorway. Around her, fragments appear to lift, circle and move outward, as though something has been released by the act of opening it.
Price: $400
Sunflowers
Painted to Pájaros Kiltros
The atmosphere shifted again with Pájaros Kiltros, a psych-folk duo from the Chiloé Archipelago in Chilean Patagonia.Their music draws on violin, piano, button accordion and the landscapes and natural world of the island they come from.
That sense of nature entered the painting almost immediately.Yellow and green dominate Sunflowers, moving across the canvas in loose, continuous brushstrokes reminiscent of leaves, flowers and growth. Visuals projected behind the musicians during the performance also found their way into the work's rhythm.
Price: $350
Santa Madness
Painted to Puuluup
Created during INSTITUT’s busiest nights at the Puuluup’s performance, Santa Madness began in a dense, high-energy environment and became one of the residency's darkest works.
The space was packed, leaving LunAzul with less room than usual to move between her canvas and materials. For an artist whose live process depends on being able to respond freely to the music and movement around her, the physical intensity of the room made the painting especially challenging.She continued working on the canvas after the performance, allowing its imagery to transform over several days. Dark forms accumulated around a central figure crowned by a golden halo. At its centre, two children surrounded by flowers gradually emerged.
The finished painting became, for LunAzul, a work about protecting innocence in the middle of chaos.The work moves between heaviness and sanctuary: darkness around the edges, something fragile and luminous protected within.The transformation is an example of how an uncomfortable experience can be worked through, changed and given a new meaning through art.
Price: $650
Cheer Up
Painted to Killabeatmaker
Electronic sounds mixed with traditional Colombian influences filled the room as the audience moved and danced around the performance. Pink, yellow and green sweep through Cheer Up in quick, expressive marks, capturing the physical energy of the room rather than a single figure or narrative.
Price: $300
Punk Killed Me and Lurking on the Sacred
Painted to Wasted Chance & Cute
The final night of the residency brought another challenge: punk.
It is not a genre LunAzul naturally gravitates toward, but live painting meant staying open to whatever the night offered. Rather than trying to make the music fit her usual visual language, she worked between two canvases and followed where its intensity took her.
The result looks noticeably different from the rest of the series.
In Punk Killed Me, black, red, yellow, white and gold create a sharper, more confrontational composition. Lurking on the Sacred moves toward darker imagery as well, with angel-like wings emerging within the work and returning to the tension between darkness and protection also present in Santa Madness.
Together, the two paintings show one of the central possibilities of live painting: allowing unfamiliar or uncomfortable experiences to push the work somewhere the artist may not have arrived on her own.
Punk Killed Me: $350
Lurking on the Sacred: $250
Visit Painting the Energy
November 4–December 4, 2026
St. Volodymyr Institute
620 Spadina Ave., Toronto
The exhibition brings together LunAzul’s seven live-painted works from INSTITUT’s pilot season, alongside two smaller works by the artist.
Purchase an artwork
Works from Painting the Energy are available for purchase, except for works already marked as sold.
If a painting speaks to you, contact svi@stvolodymyr.org for availability, pricing and purchase inquiries.
Explore more of Ivanna LunAzul’s work at arte.lunazul.eu and on Instagram at @lunazul.x and @art.lunazul.
With thanks to the musicians and performers whose work shaped this series; to Cassandra for documenting the residency; to Mark for initiating the collaboration; and to Oksana for developing the residency and exhibition with Ivanna.
