Zoya Lerman was a Ukrainian painter who lived most of her life during the Soviet era. She was born in 1934, at a time when Socialist Realism had taken hold in the Soviet Union, and art was expected to serve the interests of the authority. As a non-conformist artist, Lerman struggled to assert her artistic voice and create her unique world of sensuality on canvases. She was part of the second wave of the avant-garde, the underground, which emerged in Ukraine in the 1960s and 1980s as a form of radical resistance against totalitarianism and Soviet authority.
Lerman's paintings full of lyricism, sensuality, and emotional undertones, portraying feelings and states, such as joy, passion, sadness, lightness, and pleasure. She was known for her portrayal of ballet dancers in her works, and her characters were plastic, graceful, and poetic. Lerman loved to use bright colors to emphasize the imagery of her work. But her most unusual paintings were the "white" ones, where she painted on a white canvas with white paint to create entire plots with contours and shades only, as white meant love in her ideal world.
Zoya Lerman's paintings are stored in various collections, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine, and private collections in Europe, the USA, and Israel. Her altruism, kindness, and artistic voice will continue to be remembered by the art world, making her a unique representative of Ukrainian non-conformism in painting.