Katya Granova: Reimagining Past Narratives

Katya Granova in studio

By VICTOR SLEDGE December 20, 2025

Across decades, borders, and political systems, wherever you look history is forever under scrutiny. But for artist Katya Granova, she’s doing more than questioning history. She’s recalibrating it and giving it new life.

“If you cannot get anything objective, then I want to be there myself. I want to claim my presence. I want to see how it was or create my own version,” Granova explains. 

Granova’s artistic practice starts with a hunt for photographs. Sometimes found through her own family’s collections, other times searching through flea markets, these photos are always taken and extrapolated into Granova’s own fictionalized gestures. What starts as a photo is reimagined into a painting that extrapolates a particular moment of time. 

“I think it’s an ethically questionable thing, because in a way I’m intruding on someone else’s photo without necessarily getting consent,” she admits. “But I like the idea that it’s a way to claim agency.” That agency is where creativity meets narrative curiosity for Granova. 

Preservation of the past is a constant worry for any historian or social scientist. The idea of preservation has in itself become subjective. But Granova is not a preservationist. She is not copying these images but animating them in her paintings, giving them life out of their previous, perhaps overlooked stillness.

Rooftop Picnic, 2024, oil on canvas, 200x200 cm

During her studies at the Royal College of Art and feeling like she was not fitting in socially in London as an immigrant, led to the realization of how particular and unusual her experience was growing up in what she describes as “narrative chaos.” Growing up during a very specific moment in time—the collapse of the USSR—acts as a trigger for her painterly expressions. “The objectivity of the photograph makes me want to step in, interact, and connect with it.” 

Not all of the photos she sources are of her family, but, of course, Granova’s work is somewhat different when she’s handling them. Family photos feel more personal and investigative. And her creative voice still shines because she’s still working with photos that are often so old that there is little to no context on which to base her painting. In fact, her major rule is to only use photos that predate her birth. 

“When it’s my story, then the drive for painting over it is more about interaction,” she says. “When it’s found photographs, I can fictionalize as much as I want because they go so far back that I don’t know any of the people depicted.” 

When she explores photos of people she doesn’t know, the goal becomes more of a speculative effort to bring forgotten and lost stories back. Her presence in the photograph through her gestures is like animating their presence. 

Vacation By The Lake, 2024, oil on canvas, 120x160 cm

“I'm far more interested in the lives of unknown people. I buy photographs to make work, but also to preserve them,” she explains. 

To Granova, these people may not have been well known or left behind some major imprint on the world (or perhaps they did but who would knowingly document it), but that doesn’t diminish their right to be remembered. She offers the example of her family, that among survivors and those lost in WW2, there were real heroic acts taking place amongst ordinary people but no one will recall them. 

“They didn’t get anywhere. No one was praising some random woman saving her whole family,” says Granova. “I want to bring them back so they can have their place.”

This ferocity for preservation and for honoring one’s mark on the world, no matter how buried it may be, speaks to Granova as an artist doing work inherently tied to social history and the malleability of observed record. But it also speaks to who she was raised to be as a person.

“My father’s side of the family were all super ambitious. I came to this idea that you must leave a trace of yourself. That was very present for me since childhood,” she says. 

But that’s always the question: Whose trace do we actually give reverence to throughout history? That’s what Granova’s work makes you question.

Picnic By The Lake, 2025, oil on canvas, 220x180 cm

So many factors impact how we experience the generations that came before us. Power, money, status and a host of other social determinants have largely been the driving factor of whose legacy is memorialized.

Granova’s work has become an equalizer for the legacies she encounters. It’s not about who was most memorable. There’s an interesting irony here that Granova strikes where her art is meant to change what she sources from in some ways. The source images stay intact only through her gestures. In that way, she isn’t necessarily changing the history she finds. She’s giving it a second wind. 

“It's a way to deal with my desire to claim the past,” she says.

Even the way she chooses what photos she will work with helps to invite the viewer into the moment instead of forcing them to see it in any particular way.

Granova prefers to work with photos that are more candid, where people are not posing, which opens the photo up to more possibilities of what could have actually been happening. It also lends itself to a wider range of interpretation when Granova adds her own touch to it. 

From that point, just like the spoils of history we’ve been taught in endless iterations, the work is up to the masses to digest. It’ll never be exactly like the primary sources she starts with, but Granova’s job is to create, not to consume herself with where her creations will land in the eyes of the viewer or in the eyes of history. 

Forest Camping, 2022, oil on canvas, 200x210 cm

The elements of her work that depart from the original photos become a microcosm of how history works in our society.

“The problem of non-objective history is going to be forever,” she explains. “So in 50 years, people will be able to relate to that, but their orientation to history can change as well. And that’s hard to predict.”

Granova’s work can be seen in her latest group exhibition, Small is Beautiful, 43rd Edition, showing at the Flowers Gallery in London until January 6, 2026. The exhibition allows artists to explore the scale of their work, which offered Granova the challenge of focusing on a much more compact size than her usual default. 

“When you work on a big scale, you can do gestures from the shoulder. It creates the idea that I’m entering the past. It becomes more expressive and interesting because it’s my full presence,” she says. 

Grandma Reading Her Speech 6, 2025, oil on canvas, 13x18 cm

With Small is Beautiful, she accepted the challenge with open arms and used it as a chance to lean even more into her practice. Even if she had to finish a few pieces before she landed on the right selections.

“I did 14 of them to choose two,” she says. “I like that it enabled me to challenge myself and make my presence compatible with the size of the actual photograph in this case rather than an enlarged version of it.” 

Deeper into her craft, deeper into how it’s presented,  however you look at it, Granova’s work in Small is Beautiful is yet another avenue through which she’s found a way to provide viewers a look into the past and how it can be reinvented in the present day.

If you want to learn more about Granova, you can view her website here and learn more about Small is Beautiful here.