Maryna Riepnova.

Maryna Riepnova was born on New Year's Day, 1994, in Odesa, Ukraine, in a communal apartment where several families shared a cold hallway and a cockroach-ridden kitchen. There was a yellow rubber duck in the bath and a soap that smelled of sun. In the living room of her great-grandmother Nadya, a printed reproduction of a painting called Siesta hung on the wall: two young Spanish women by a fountain under an olive tree, flirting with a shy shepherd in a country Maryna had never seen. She fell asleep and woke up to it every day, and spent the following decades imagining the south.

She left Ukraine the week the war started, carrying one carry-on suitcase, determined and terrified. When she arrived in Málaga, the water was exactly the blue she had been inventing since she was four years old. The euphoria of that first half-year — the light, the contrast, the color turned up past what reality is supposed to allow — has never entirely left her work. Her paintings are deliberately oversaturated, brighter than the world they depict, because she paints not what objects look like but what color they would radiate if they followed their mood rather than convention. She calls this visual medicine: a gift of color to people who do not have enough of it in their lives. She holds a Master's in Fine Arts, is a member of APLAMA, and exhibits regularly in Spain and internationally. She lives and works in Málaga.