Apr 05, 2026 Artist in Focus

The Self Does Not Fit the Reflection - Aziya Ikhtymbayeva

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva works in airbrush painting across figuration and still life. Based in Prague. A Catapult Artist in Focus on perception, migration, and the self that holds still.

Artist in Focus. Aziya Ikhtymbayeva - Airbrush painting across figuration and still life. Image: Artist Portrait - Image Courtesy of the Artist

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva

Born:
Almaty, Kazakhstan

Based in:
Prague, Czech Republic

Medium:
Airbrush, acrylic, oil on linen

Instagram:
@aziya

Image Courtesy:
Courtesy the Artist

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva - Prague, figurative painting

The figures in Aziya's paintings are composed. Composed to the point of removing something — the hand, the brushstroke, the evidence of making. Painted exclusively with airbrush on linen, her canvases hold the quality of an image that has arrived fully formed: smooth, interior, and faintly resistant to resolution.

What runs through the work is a displacement the surface alone cannot carry. Her figures: women, mostly, placed in landscape, interior, or symbolic still life, appear contained by the frame, but seem to look somewhere the painting cannot follow. The tension accumulates before it announces itself.

The image knows it is being watched. The figure does not.

In Always Foreign, a blue-toned face is reflected upside-down across a mirror-like horizontal divide, the reflection warm, rose-tinted, a different temperature than its source. The self and its double do not match.

This is not a failure of the mirror; it seems to be the work's central proposition: that the image one holds of oneself and the image returned by the world are never the same color.

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva airbrush painting of a female face with closed eyes reflected in water, shifting from cool blue to warm red tones — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *Always Foreign*, acrylic on linen, 180 × 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva airbrush painting of a purple-toned female figure touching water, creating ripples with a mirrored face reflection - catapult artist in focus series - munchies art club — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *Water Remembers*, 2026, acrylic on linen, 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva painting of red hands holding a mirror reflecting a blue female face with closed eyes — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *Projection*, 2026, acrylic and oil on linen, 50 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

This doubling repeats. Water Remembers shows a purple-toned figure reaching toward a still surface, touching it with one hand, seeing a teal reflection rise to meet her. The faces lean toward each other without touching. The reflected self is present, close, and chromatically wrong — as if the water remembers a version of the person that the person no longer is, or has not yet become.

The airbrush holds these tensions in place formally. Without visible gesture, without the trace of the hand that made the image, Aziya's paintings achieve a controlled remove. The surface seems to give nothing away. This is the technical equivalent of her conceptual argument: the outside cannot confirm what the inside holds. What persists across the works is the sense that the figures know more than they show — and that the paintings know more than the figures do.

Among the smaller-format works, What Watches from Within distills this into a single object: an open locket, one oval showing a closed eye, the other an open one. Half of the self is sleeping. Half of it is watching.

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva painting of an open locket pendant with one closed eye and one open eye against a blue figure — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *What Watches from Within*, 2025, acrylic and oil on linen, 50 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Aziya - new painter in focus from Kazakhastan , Almaty, Aziya Ikhtymbayeva oil painting of a sculptural vertical form emerging between dark green landscape-like shapes under a pink sky — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *Monument*, 2026, oil on linen, 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Aziya Ikhtymbayeva oil painting of soft abstract body-like forms in warm peach tones resembling a reclining figure — **Aziya Ikhtymbayeva**, *Resting Form*, 2025, oil on linen, 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and shaped by a life crossing Asia, Europe, and the United States, Aziya Ikhtymbayeva draws on orientalism and surrealism as structural references though her relationship to both holds more critical distance than allegiance. She now holds Czech citizenship and works from Prague.

Her practice spans figurative painting, landscape, and still life, with women and their relationship to space as the persistent subject. The paintings that step away from the figure entirely, Monument, a solitary standing stone between dark rolling hills under a coral sky — carry the same quality of interiority as the portraits. Even without a body, the landscape holds something it does not name.

The question her paintings leave open is not who the figure is, but who decided what she would reflect.

Instagram of Aziya Ikhtymbayeva