Kateryna Lysovenko’s Salzburg frescoes fuse Mithraic sacrifice, Christian catacombs and Ukrainian trauma into a meditation on creation and destruction. Painted directly onto the walls of the Kunstverein, the work will vanish forever when the exhibition closes in November.

A white bull dies beneath the blow of the god Mithras. A dog and a snake move towards the blood gushing from the bull’s neck, while a scorpion attacks its testicles. Around them are the Sun god, accompanied by his messenger, the raven, as well as the Moon, the Earth and the Ocean.

In 1922 an underground sanctuary was discovered by chance in the Italian city of Capua, a rare examples with painted walls. The murals depicted seven stages of an initiation ritual into the cult of Mithras, who sacrificed the cosmic bull from whose blood and flesh life on Earth was born. The initiate was undressed, blindfolded, and then sodomized by the mystagogue. Unfortunately, only photographs taken in the last century survive of much of the mystic frescoes today – black mould has since destroyed the paintings.

For the artist Kateryna Lysovenko (b. 1989), mithraea and early Christian sanctuaries - which often arose in the same catacombs - became the inspiration for her project ‘Creation, Catastrophe, Creation, Again and Again,’ a site-specific commission for Salzburg’s Ring Gallery, curated by Mirela Baciak. An entire floor of the elegant Salzburger Kunstverein headquarters has been painted by the artist, who was born in Kyiv and now lives in Vienna. On one wall we see a bull gazing at us with a sheepish expression - still alive, not yet sacrificed, but its phallic tail hints at the Mithraic rituals. There is another female figure with the horns of a bull; beside her is a figure that seems to be inside a womb, pushing outwards – the mystery of a new world being born.

Lysovenko’s work recalls that of Ukrainian artist Marharyta Polovinko (1994–2025), who painted forest spirits from Hutsul mythology using her own blood. “When I start to paint, the blood is bright red. Just like the memory of trauma. Then the work fades, becomes brown or even green. The memory of trauma also remains, but its saturation, its colour changes. If something bad happens, we immediately want to erase it. But over time, it becomes our experience, and we want to keep that,” Polovinko once said. Similarly, red tones dominate Lysovenko's palette, evoking the blood spilled during sacrifices in the mithraea, which even had channels built in to drain it. Or perhaps it is the colour of human viscera?

Ancient rituals are only one key to understanding Lysovenko’s frescoes. Walking through the corridors of the Ring Gallery, the viewer can observe a movement from the birth of life to its sombre ending. Diving with scuba gear into the depths of the sea, an explorer can observe a similar movement among jellyfish and other transparent inhabitants of the aquatic world, recalling the first days of creation. By the will of some omnipotent force, these enigmatic bubbles may become internal organs extracted from the body, or a representative of the plant world, and we can only guess at what lies before us – a human kidney in cross-section, a deep-sea creature, an exotic fruit, or a cell magnified under a microscope?.

Lysovenko emphasizes the equality of all living things, not yet divided by discriminators into races, orders, classes and species. A cell under the lens of a microscope has no nationality, sex, or citizenship; there are no ideologies or state borders. And wherever such divisions do exist, fascism begins. One of the fragments in the mural is called ‘Cyclone of Fascism’ – a force that destroys every recognizable form. Beside it sits another fragment: ‘Feeding Death.’ An ordinary (“fascist” says the artist) family has gathered together at a table for a meal as well as a yellow, skeletal figure which is feeding from the mother's breast. Fascism is as commonplace as a family dinner, and death at this table is an ordinary guest, unnoticed by either the father of the family or his offspring.

There is also a figure bound to a post - is it a saint being tormented by savages, or a criminal being punished for his deed? A second figure, also with translucent innards, seems to be preparing to scalp him with a knife. Or perhaps he holds a crown of thorns in his hand? The cycle of violence and repentance for violence is as endless as the cycle of creation and catastrophe – those condemned for imagined crimes become holy martyrs, but their followers pass once more through mockery and torture. The curator notes that the exhibition's central problem is dehumanization. Yet, paradoxically, new life inevitably springs up amid the ruins, and the cycle of creation and destruction repeats itself. What gives it its strength? Perhaps it is the eternal energy of desire – an unbounded libido that opens the way to secret knowledge, as in the ritual of Mithraic initiation, where the mystagogue enters into a mystical bond with the initiate.

Last year Lysovenko became a laureate of the Austrian Mint award (Münze Österreich Prize), and later this month her exhibition ´Borderland´ will open at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). One of the organizers behind the exhibition is the Austrian Mint with an illustrious history reaching back to 1194. “Lysovenko employs tools of reduction and absence; colouration is interpreted as its own space. What results are images that capture moods – antipodes to propaganda”, states the announcement advertising the show.

The exhibition in Salzburg will run until the end of November. The only way to preserve the mural would be to seal it behind fake walls, but that would be impossible in the historic building of the Salzburger Kunstverein, founded in 1844 by Prince-Archbishop Friedrich Schwarzenberg. The mural will be painted over, surviving only in the form of a printed catalogue and studies on canvas and watercolour sheets. “The fact that these murals disappear so quickly also matters to me - afterwards, they exist only in the memories of those who saw them, and in that way they live on with us. But I dream of creating a real fresco using the traditional wet-fresco technique - I’ve already made one like that near Odessa,” the artist says.

The installation in Salzburg is complemented by another work by Lysovenko, which is part of Manifesta 16, the biennial taking place in the Ruhr area. It is on display in the Church of St Anna in Bochum. The painting ‘Migrating Waves’ is dedicated to the fate of refugees and of all those marginalised, dehumanised and excluded in any society. Before us stand several figures, including a giant snail and a human-crane hybrid. As in the frescoes in Salzburg, we see their circulatory systems – and perhaps this blood, too, will be spilled so that, as in the Mithraic myth, a new world might be born from it.