Everyone I meet in Kyiv is tired. Physically tired. Emotionally tired. Tired from the shrill loud whirl of the air raid app forcing them from sleep to the bomb shelters. Tired of the hours spent underground. Tired of the fear. I spoke to a woman on my night train from Moldova who had spent a week in Chișinău catching up on sleep. It is therefore understandable that much of the work in the biennial PinchukArtCentre Prize—a gathering of twenty artists from across the country, all under 35, some displaced from their home regions to the safer west, some abroad temporarily—is bathed in a melancholic desire for calm. White is the recurring shade. In Mud Hut (2025), Anton Saenko has covered the entire gallery wall with the whitewashed clay mix used to build the titular countryside dwellings. Hung to this feature is one of the artist’s monochromes, also white. It is meditative, full of pathos, inviting the view to disappear, escape perhaps, into its pale frame. A snow-white landscape by Mykhailo Alekseenko, a painting reminiscent of the land I had seen stretching out over nineteen hours on that train into Ukraine, takes the feeling further. Peaceful Landscape in a Nonexistent Museum …