London Artist Maya Golyshkina Is a Model of Self-Promotion

November 2, 2026 / Rolling Stone British /

Maya Golyshkina, Maya Plates, 2021. Courtesy the artist

Imagine gazing a little too long at one of Claes Oldenburg’s larger-than-life soft sculptures, his plopping Floor Burger with pickle on top, which evokes its weight and nostalgia as it sits in your stomach, or his lazing Floor Cone that carries all the emotion of your inner child dropping their hard-won treat, or his deflated homages to goods so reliable they’re taken for granted until Oldenburg comes along and stands them 10 feet tall—toilets, washstands, mixers, blenders. Now imagine gazing so deep those sculptures are reduced to abstract shapes, shapes within shapes, and then suddenly there’s the arc of hips, the surprise of a nipple. Suddenly, the artist is staring right back at you, the viewer, the prospective buyer, the long-shot, larger-than-life solution to all their problems, propositioning you for validation, and money, for making you feel something real? You can’t unsee them looking back at you now.

Of course, Oldenburg never had to worry about his work being scaled down for fast-scrolling screens, fat fingers covering up the caption bearing his name, or maybe he would have painted his head pickle green and poked it through the top of his poufy burger bun. Maybe Tom Wesselmann would have stood nude painted in head-to-toe lipstick pink in Still Life #60 if he thought his sedan-sized gleaming gold tube wasn’t enough to hold your attention. But 20th-century pop artists didn’t have to create for today’s attention economy, where artists only succeed by becoming as much a recognizable product as the pictures they create. That’s one reason there’s no separating the mushroom pizza, the giant booger, the middle finger, the Aperol spritz, from the artist, in the photographs of Maya Golyshkina.

Golyshkina was not always the physical embodiment of an airplane, cityscape or telephone, as she appeared when captured by the English photographer Martin Parr before his passing last year. His candid documentation of her work, and the resulting show at Galerie Nicola von Senger in Zurich last fall, is the happy result of Golyshkina changing her artistic practice in late 2019, a few months before experiencing the Covid lockdown in her native Russia. Earlier that year, she had been channeling Juergen Teller to an extreme—playfully recreating images from his 2015 book, Kanye, Juergen & Kim, then taking it a step further and burying a friend alive, when suddenly, weeks before the pandemic, she turned the lens more upon herself, wearing mops and heads of lettuce as wigs, eating a bowl of pasta, the shapes also affixed to her face. She was no longer licking lollipops to appeal to the male gaze but stuffing her mouth with a length of baguette she wore like a saber-tooth: She decided choosing to stare at her was no longer her problem, but yours, and today collectors pay for the privilege.

A woman kneeling on a bed in a thong looking back at the camera - she is covered in images of kittens and puppies — Golyshkina’s self-portraits ask viewers to confront why they can’t look away. Courtesy the artist

Overnight, she was alone in her bedroom, like everyone else around the world, and with limited resources and unlimited time, she made the choice to step in front of her camera and expand her photography practice to include sculpture, set design and modeling, where she became her sole muse and subject, literally losing herself in the new identities she constructed. Her Covid-era works, which evoked past Parr Autoportraits, including Benidorm, Spain (1997) in which Parr’s head appears in the belly of a shark, tapped into her childhood art education, and childlike imagination, posing herself in crude cardboard tableaus for a social media audience eager for escapism.

“It wasn’t a proper art school, I was more like a toddler at a nursery, and when I went to art school as a teenager it was so boring, so I kept this [earlier] approach. As a kid, I used to build different things on my bed or go to the playground, I played with cardboard, and I kept all of this in mind subconsciously,” Golyshkina told Observer. “I think that’s why when I started my practice and was just a photographer, and a painter, it wasn’t enough for me.”

A woman wearing a large suit made from magazine pages and carrying a bag made from the same material — One series of characters Golyshkina crafted using only pages from the 2020 Autumn/Winter edition of AnOther Magazine. Courtesy the artist

The universality of her DIY works made them an instantly relatable hit, and by the time the Covid pandemic gave way to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Golyshkina found among her followers both selfless generosity and an appetite for acquisition, which offered her an off-ramp to western Europe, if not a cure to her feelings of isolation. “I always wanted to leave Russia, and when the war started I didn’t know where I would go, but then I received a message from a lady following me who was a casting director in the UK, and she offered to sponsor a visa. I had some connections here [in London] so I didn’t hesitate,” Golyshkina said.

And today she identifies as a western artist. “The U.K. is a western country the same as America, mostly built by immigrants, and most of the people I know here are immigrants. It’s hard to identify yourself as a UK artist, but I’m more western than Russian.” But there are challenges that come with rising to the top of a melting pot at a young age. “It’s tricky because people here come from so much wealth and money, and there’s a gap between me and then, because I built my career all by myself, and because I became successful very young, it’s a gift and a curse—I came here at 21, and when I meet people my age they’re still students.”

Adding to her isolation is the work itself, which finds her alone and subject to a constant stream of unfiltered comments. Some of her works show her in what appears to be states of consumption and sacrifice. In 2022, her life-sized body parts appeared across a limited edition series of dinner plates for Norwich gallery Moosey; another portrait depicts her as a hunk of cheese being grated down. But there’s only one criticism of her work that affects her: “I use Photoshop, but I get accused of using A.I. which is not true.” (And in a sea of images now regularly labeled A.I. by Instagram, it’s worth noting hers are not among them.)

A woman pretending to be pregnant holding up a doll in a painted space — Maya Golyshkina, *What if I became a mu*m, 2024. Courtesy the artist

Praise and criticism is all good for business when building a personal brand of course, it means people are talking about you, and plenty of brands have come calling. In the past five years, she’s produced images for Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, U.K. indie streetwear brand Lazy Oaf, Tate London museum and Maison Margiela. In 2022, she produced an image of herself dressed in red and white as a harlequin, her face crudely painted like a clown, her hand holding the string to a balloon drawn on the bathroom wall behind the toilet where she sat spread-legged. Margiela ultimately rejected the advertisement, but it’s proven her most successful portrait to date. “It’s, funny enough, the most expensive work of mine so far,” Golyshkina said. “They said it didn’t look commercial enough and they didn’t like me being a clown, so they paid me but they didn’t use it and so I made so much more money from the image as a print.”

Her collectors have always found her through Instagram, leading her to prefer direct sales to the gallery system, which can exert too much control for too little reward, not unlike commercial collaborations. “People who buy art and have money don’t really care where they buy from; people have snobby conversations about galleries but collectors don’t really care, they just see what they want and find a way to buy it and that’s it,” Golyshkina said. “I care about money, and so many people are scared of saying it aloud. I’m happy to work with big galleries and big institutions but I don’t want to combine bartending and art, that’s not me.”

“My career has changed a lot in the past year, and I want to do more set design work and find a bigger studio. I want to do more commercial work on the side but I don’t want to work with brands [in my capacity] as an artist unless it’s really special, because I want to elevate my practice, I want to take pictures with other people and try new things. The limitations I faced during Covid aren’t relevant anymore and I feel like I’m a different person now.”

Among the institutions that merit special attention, artistically and commercially, is the National Portrait Gallery in London, which recently commissioned her to create an advertisement. “They want me to promote their shows because they have more eyeballs on Instagram than in real life,” Golyshkina said, noting how museums and galleries both are still searching for ways to compete for attention from those content to scroll their Instagram feeds.