FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2026
All Our Yesterdays: A new solo exhibition by Katya Granova at The Handbag Factory in London
Katya Granova, Reclining Grandma, 2025, oil on canvas, 155 x 185 cm
London, UK – Katya Granova presents All Our Yesterdays, a new solo exhibition of paintings with curatorial assistance by Róisín McQueirns and accompanied by a performance at The Handbag Factory (ASC). The exhibition is on view March 6 – March 9, 2026, with a private viewing on March 5th.
All Our Yesterdays brings together a selection of Katya Granova’s recent paintings, all based on old photographs sourced from family albums, state archives, and flea markets across different countries. These images capture the daily lives of ordinary people—lost or forgotten yesterdays. Transferring them onto large-scale canvases, Granova intervenes in each scene, animating these bygone moments through open painterly gestures and vibrant colour.
“New yesterdays appear every day. Old yesterdays are stored in the dusty depot of unstable human memory, guarded by forces that can alter them. It sounds like a repressive detention. It sounds like a bright new future. Yesterdays never return from the depot.” – Katya Granova
This tension between presence and absence, manifested in these old photographs, drives Granova’s practice. Her brushwork reflects varied emotional responses to the content and context of each image, yet what remains constant is the urge to challenge linear time and temporality of being, to intrude upon a past she never witnessed.
Born in the USSR shortly before its collapse, Granova grew up with constantly shifting historical perspectives and contradictory family memories. This narrative chaos complicated her relationship with the past—unreliable yet omnipresent—and launched a desire to access something more objective. The objective past is perhaps most condensed in family photographs, which can be considered too banal, boring and personal to be falsified.
The phrase “All our yesterdays,” originally from the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy in Macbeth, is also the name of a 1969 Star Trek episode exploring the challenges of time travel. Granova’s practice operates as speculative time travel, emerging from resistance to forgetfulness, historical manipulations, erasure of some lives and humanity’s existential predicament. The works manifest this protest through intense painterly presence, achieved with energetic movements in oil paint and oil stick.
An accompanying dance performance will respond directly to the source photographs, extending Granova’s explorations beyond the canvas.
Details
Private view: March 5, 2026, 6 – 9 PM
On view: March 6 – March 9, 2026, 10 AM – 6 PM
3 Loughborough St, London SE11 5RB, UK
About Katya Granova
Katya Granova (b. 1988, St. Petersburg, Russia) is based between London and Leipzig. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2021); a Certificate in Fine Art from the Paris College of Art (2015); and an MA in Art and Space from Kingston University, London (2013). Recent exhibitions include Small is Beautiful (Flowers Gallery, London, 2025), From under the Bed (Archiv Massiv, Leipzig, 2025); and A Song of Unrequited Love for Britain (RuptureXIBIT, London, 2024). Recent residencies include the Monte da Japonica (2026), Turps Art Residency (2025) and Leipzig International Art Residency (2025). Her work has been recognized with the Bath Open Art Prize (2023), Art Works Open (2021), and Signature Art Prize (2020); she was a finalist for the Castlegate Art Prize (2020) and the Women United Art Prize (2023), received shortlist recognition for the Bankley Prize (2019), and was longlisted for Jackson’s Art Prize, the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2023) and the John Moores Painting Prize (2020). In 2020, she collaborated with Burberry UK, and in 2021 her work entered the permanent collection of the Royal College of Art.
Website: https://www.katya-granova.com
Instagram: @katyagranova