There is a particular kind of courage required to draw in public. Not the courage of the studio artist, who works alone and in private, but the courage of the person who stands in a courtroom, a protest, a prison, or a refugee camp and puts pencil to paper in full view of those she is documenting. Victoria Lomasko has been exercising this courage for more than two decades. A Russian graphic artist born in 1978 in Serpukhov, a small industrial city south of Moscow, she has spent her career developing a practice of graphic reportage that is simultaneously journalism, activism, and art — a form of witnessing that insists on the humanity of those who are most often rendered invisible by the state, the media, and the market.
Lomasko’s work is not comfortable. It documents sex workers in Moscow, inmates in juvenile prisons, migrant workers in the Russian hinterlands, LGBT activists facing state persecution, and protesters being beaten in the streets of Minsk. It records the Pussy Riot trial, the slow collapse of rural Russia, and the daily life of communities that exist in what she calls the “post-Soviet space” — the vast, heterogeneous territory of former Soviet republics that Western media tends to flatten into a single, undifferentiated backdrop for geopolitical drama. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Lomasko fled to Berlin, where she continues to work. The invasion did not change her practice; it confirmed it. Drawing, for Lomasko, has always been a form of resistance. It is simply that the thing being resisted has become more nakedly brutal.
The Genre of Graphic Reportage
Graphic reportage is a genre that sits at the intersection of journalism, comics, and documentary art. It has a distinguished lineage — from the courtroom sketches of the nineteenth century to the war drawings of Käthe Kollwitz, from the social realism of the Ashcan School to the graphic journalism of Joe Sacco, with whom Lomasko has often been compared and with whom she has collaborated . What distinguishes graphic reportage from illustration or editorial cartooning is its commitment to direct observation: the graphic reporter is present at the events she depicts, drawing from life rather than from imagination or secondary sources.
Lomasko trained at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, graduating in 2003 with a degree in book design and graphic art . Her early influences were the Soviet book illustrators Oleg Vasilyev and Erik Bulatov, who worked as a pair during the Soviet era, earning a living from illustration while creating more personal, conceptually charged work in private. She has spoken of a formative encounter with a quote by Vasilyev: “The objects I create — paintings, drawings, and so on — are not an aim in themselves and are not the essence of my working process. The point is that my work forms me. I live this life and create myself” . This idea of drawing as a form of self-formation — as a practice through which the artist discovers and constitutes her own understanding of the world — is central to Lomasko’s approach.
Her father, Valentin Lomasko, was a propaganda artist at a secretive metalworkers’ factory in Serpukhov, producing agitprop murals and posters for the Soviet state. He was not a communist, and he hated the work, but it was the only artistic employment available in their small town. Lomasko has spoken of the irony of discovering, as an adult, that her own practice of politically engaged drawing was, in a sense, a continuation of her father’s work — but with the crucial difference that she chose her subjects rather than having them assigned by the state . “I discover life through drawing the reality around me,” she has said. “Graphic reportages helped me to understand what post-Soviet society is like and to realise my position in it. As a person from the provinces, I know what it means to be invisible, and I wanted to give a voice and a place to ordinary people. Suddenly, it turned out that this was real political art” .
Other Russias: The Invisible and the Angry
Lomasko’s breakthrough work, Other Russias, was published in English by the Brooklyn publishing house n+1 in March 2017, translated by Thomas Campbell, and subsequently by Penguin UK in June of the same year . The 320-page book collects more than a decade of graphic reportage in two sections: Invisible, which documents the lives of marginalised communities in Russia prior to the 2012 protests — juvenile prison wards, rural schoolteachers, migrant workers, sex workers, elderly people seeking refuge in Russian Orthodoxy — and Angry, which chronicles the Russian political opposition from 2012 to 2016, including the Pussy Riot trial, the large Moscow protests, and the LGBT community’s efforts to remain visible in the face of the government’s adoption of anti-gay legislation .
The book won the 2018 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize for Best Book in Translation — a recognition that reflected not only its literary and artistic quality but its significance as a document of a Russia that was rapidly disappearing from view . By 2012, the year of Putin’s re-election, it had become extremely difficult for Lomasko to publish or exhibit her work in Russia. She continued to work, but increasingly outside the country, accepting invitations from feminist groups in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, and Dagestan, conducting workshops and producing reportages that expanded the geographical scope of her inquiry from Russia to the broader post-Soviet world .
What makes Other Russias remarkable as a work of art is not simply its documentary content but its formal intelligence. Lomasko’s drawing style is spare and direct — figures rendered in clean, confident lines, with minimal shading and a strong sense of compositional rhythm. Text and image are integrated in the manner of the best graphic novels, with the written captions and speech bubbles functioning not as explanations of the images but as extensions of them, adding layers of irony, pathos, and complexity that neither medium could achieve alone. The effect is of a kind of visual journalism that is simultaneously more immediate and more emotionally resonant than conventional photography or prose reportage — a form that captures not just what people look like but how they hold themselves, what their faces reveal, what the space around them says about the conditions of their lives.
The Last Soviet Artist: Empire, Exile, and the Drawing as Witness
Lomasko’s most recent book, The Last Soviet Artist (n+1 Books, 2025), is a more complex and more personal work than Other Russias . It began as a planned continuation of her previous book, with a wider geographical coverage — visits to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, and the North Caucasus, documenting the diversity of the post-Soviet world and the varying ways in which different communities have processed the collapse of the Soviet empire. But history intervened. The pandemic changed the book’s structure; the Belarusian Revolution of 2020 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 transformed it into something else entirely: a chronicle of political catastrophe and personal exile.
The title is both a description and a provocation. Lomasko calls herself “the last Soviet artist” not out of nostalgia but as a methodological claim: she belongs to the last generation that remembers life in the Soviet Union, and she uses that memory as a lens through which to see the present . “My distinction from other artists of the same generation,” she has explained, “is that I don’t address the past. Instead, I use my Soviet identity as a tool to see the present and the future from a perspective that is dissimilar to the perspective of a Western author. This is the mentality of a person who has grown up not in a capitalist but in a socialist society” .
The book’s second section, “The Last Soviet Artist Becomes Someone Else,” is among the most remarkable pieces of graphic journalism produced in recent years. It documents Lomasko’s experience of the Belarusian Revolution — she crossed the border illegally, hidden in a shuttle bag by a private minibus driver — and her subsequent flight from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine . The drawings from this period have a different quality from her earlier reportage: more fragmented, more subjective, more willing to use the visual language of the dream or the hallucination alongside the documentary sketch. They are the work of an artist processing not just what she has witnessed but what it means to be a witness — to be present at historical events that are too large and too violent to be fully comprehended, and to insist, in the face of that incomprehension, on the act of drawing.
The Politics of Visibility
What connects all of Lomasko’s work, across its different subjects and periods, is a commitment to what might be called the politics of visibility. Her subjects are, almost without exception, people who are rendered invisible by the structures of power — by the state, by the media, by the market, by the dominant narratives of national identity. The sex workers, the prisoners, the rural poor, the LGBT activists, the protesters, the refugees: these are people whose lives are shaped by forces they did not choose and cannot easily resist, and who are rarely given the opportunity to speak for themselves in public.
Lomasko’s practice is not simply about giving these people a platform, however. It is about something more formally specific: the act of drawing from life, in the presence of her subjects, creates a relationship of attention and reciprocity that is different from the relationship created by photography or prose journalism. To draw someone is to look at them for a sustained period, to attend to the specific quality of their face and posture and gesture, to make choices about what to include and what to omit. It is, in a sense, an act of care — and it is one that Lomasko has described as central to her understanding of what art is for.
“The goal of art is not to force to create revolutions but to help the evolution of everyone, a personal transformation,” she told El País in 2024. “Politicians speak to crowds, but artists, writers, poets, filmmakers conduct a dialogue with you personally. Everyone is bigger than his or her social role. The goal of art is to help us never forget our greatness” .
This is a generous and humanist vision of art’s social function, and it is one that is tested — and, in Lomasko’s case, confirmed — by the conditions under which she has had to work. Drawing has been, for her, not just a medium but a form of survival: a way of maintaining a relationship with the world and with other people in circumstances that are designed to isolate and silence.
Recent Work and the Life in Exile
Since her arrival in Berlin in 2022, Lomasko has continued to produce work at a remarkable pace. Her 2023 solo exhibition Cocoon at Edel Assanti in London marked a shift in her practice: the works in the show were more painterly and more interior than her earlier reportage, exploring her own experience of displacement and the psychological condition of exile . The title referred to the protective shell that the exile builds around herself — a necessary withdrawal from the world that is also, paradoxically, a preparation for re-emergence.
She has also continued to work in the monumental mural format that she considers her “main passion” — a form she traces to her father’s work as a decorator and to the Soviet tradition of public art . Recent commissions have included a monumental panel for a cultural centre in the Netherlands, and she has spoken of her ambition to paint libraries, canteens, schools, and enterprises — spaces of everyday life rather than the white cube of the gallery.
In 2022, Lomasko participated in Documenta 15 in Kassel, the major international contemporary art exhibition, where she was invited to capture the spirit of the event through her characteristic graphic reportage . The following year, she was included in Draw for Change! at the Comic Strip Museum in Brussels, and her work continues to be exhibited across Europe and the United States. A documentary film about her, Tree of Violence, was released in 2025 as part of the Draw for Change series of films about international cartoonists .
The Last Soviet Artist was published in English by n+1 Books in 2025 and has been widely reviewed. Writing in BOMB Magazine, the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow described it as the work of “a guiding light for the community of artists and graphic journalists across the globe” . The book has been translated into multiple languages and is available from Penguin UK.
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FAQ
Who is Victoria Lomasko?
Victoria Lomasko (b. 1978, Serpukhov, Russia) is a Russian graphic artist and activist known for her practice of graphic reportage — a form of documentary drawing that combines journalism, comics, and direct observation. She is the author of Other Russias (Penguin, 2017) and The Last Soviet Artist (n+1 Books, 2025), and is represented by Edel Assanti gallery in London. She has lived and worked in Berlin since fleeing Russia in 2022.
What is graphic reportage?
Graphic reportage is a genre that combines drawing with journalism, producing documentary accounts of real events, places, and people through hand-drawn images and text. Unlike illustration, it is based on direct observation: the graphic reporter is present at the events she depicts. Key practitioners include Joe Sacco, Molly Crabapple, and Victoria Lomasko.
What is Other Russias about?
Other Russias (n+1/Penguin, 2017) is Lomasko’s first English-language book, collecting more than a decade of graphic reportage in two sections. Invisible documents the lives of marginalised communities in Russia — sex workers, prisoners, rural poor, migrant workers — while Angry chronicles the Russian political opposition from 2012 to 2016, including the Pussy Riot trial and the Moscow protests. It won the 2018 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize for Best Book in Translation.
Why did Victoria Lomasko leave Russia?
Lomasko fled Russia in February 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even before the invasion, her work had been effectively banned in Russia due to censorship, making it impossible for her to publish or exhibit domestically. She now lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Where can I see Victoria Lomasko’s work?
Lomasko is represented by Edel Assanti gallery in London (edelassanti.com). Her books Other Russias and The Last Soviet Artist are available from Penguin UK and n+1 Books respectively. Her work is held in public collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, and the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, Poland.
