“I will never forget when my father, Mykhailo, took me to an abandoned wooden church in his home village Nemyriwka,” Voronko recalls. “The windows were shattered, the altar desecrated. During the communist era, religion was forbidden. That church was destroyed by bulldozers one night; erased as if faith itself could be silenced.” But one icon – the Madonna with the Child – was rescued. Carried home by his father, it stood as a symbol of survival. “It became part of our family. A silent witness,” Voronko says.

This blend of fragility and endurance permeates his life and work. Encouraged by his father, a self-taught artist, Voronko entered art school as a child. After several attempts, he was admitted to the Lviv Academy of Arts, where he focused on applied arts. Before that, he studied restoration at a college; a discipline that shaped his artistic philosophy profoundly. “To restore is to enter into a dialogue with time,” he explains. “It taught me to respect history, materials, and the quiet wisdom in old things. You can’t create something new and meaningful without understanding what came before.” That principle continues to guide him, whether he’s restoring sacred artifacts or building layered textures with impasto on canvas. “When I started exploring impasto more seriously, it felt like a performance. Each stroke became a declaration of emotion: bold, physical, alive.”

In 1999, Voronko was invited to the cultural center Burg Beeskow in Germany for an artist residency. Over the following years, he traveled between Ukraine and Germany, echoing the migratory cranes in a ceramic panel he created for a Ukrainian school in Poland; his diploma work based on a poem by Bohdan Lepky. “It was dedicated to displaced people, to the longing for home. That theme remains close to my heart.” In 2006, he received official residence in Germany, eventually bringing his wife and daughter to Beeskow in 2013. A year later, he opened his art studio in a space he had long admired in the town center. “It felt like the right time. My family was with me. It became a home for my creativity.”

Voronko’s landscapes are known for blending realism with impressionistic emotion, what he jokingly calls imprexpressionism. “I admire both traditions, but I want to evolve them. Light plays a central role, especially when I paint en plein air. Nature changes so fast; there’s never enough time. That urgency pushes me to work instinctively.” For him, painting outdoors is a kind of ritual. “I also work in a fine arts archive, restoring historic objects. When I step outside to paint, I stop thinking. I just feel. It’s like a retreat; not rest, but restoration of another kind.”

Fields at dusk, lakes in early morning, shifting shadows on the forest floor; these are the places that draw him. “I prefer the last hour before sunset. The light becomes soft, mysterious. It feels like the world is holding its breath.” This emotional connection to nature carries over into his use of texture. “Impasto lets me translate feeling into physical form. It’s like a fast Latin dance: intense, rhythmic, full of energy. From a restorer’s perspective, thick oil paint also has structural integrity. It binds like fused metal.” In his compositions, silence is just as important as detail. “I use subdued color, soft light, and empty space to evoke moods like solitude and nostalgia,” he says. “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I feel. A puddle reflecting the sky can feel like a portal to childhood, until you step in and it scatters. That vanishing moment, that’s what I want to capture.”

Voronko’s work has gained international recognition. He recently exhibited in New York at Van Der Plas Gallery and took part in ARTfair Innsbruck and NEUE ArT Dresden. In spring 2025, he was featured at ARTMUC in Munich and will continue with exhibitions this summer at ArtistMeeting in Belgium and the EuropArtFair in Maastricht. “Each exhibition is a new opportunity to connect. To share not just images, but emotion and memory. That’s what art is for me,” Voronko says. “Not a fixed statement, but a living echo of everything that shaped me.”