Elena Bulycheva is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, video, and artistic research. Her research investigates washing as a cultural, social, political, and artistic practice.

Moving across contexts, both intimate and large-scale, her work examines the act of washing in its many guises: laundering clothes, domestic cleaning, maintenance and caregiving, demolition and site clearance, and environmental care. Her abstract paintings are a characteristic example: marked by an interplay of vivid color, texture, and form, and realized on irregularly shaped, sculptural canvases, they approach the canvas as a locus of social contexts and gendered values, implementing unconventional processes derived from female labor, such as using a washing machine to disrupt the paint. Yet this development is not linear but cyclical—a dynamic that serves as a constant metaphor in her work, both conceptually and formally.

In recent years, her practice has expanded to encompass video, developed in part through seminars led by Prof. Omer Fast. The critical knowledge and feedback gained in this context have informed her recent video works, deepening the role of moving images within her artistic research. Through her video research, for instance, she makes these concerns concrete: Laundry (2026) works with found footage to make invisible labor visible, tracing how washing is represented across cultures — from domestic rituals to the large industrial laundries of Mumbai — revealing washing as a site of social inequality between those who wash and those for whom things are washed, between waged labor and unpaid domestic care. Soap Opera (2026) assembles bath scenes from across the history of cinema, reframing footage typically shot through the male gaze toward a female perspective — showing women through vulnerability, pain, resistance, and care — where cleansing never reaches completion but repeats as a loop in which the woman is always already insufficient and must begin again.

Residing and working in Hamburg, Germany, Elena Bulycheva is currently completing her PhD in Art Practice (2026-2029) after receiving her MFA in Fine Arts from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (2017-2024) in Hamburg, Germany, graduating under the supervision of renowned artist Anselm Reyle, previously having studied at the University of Arts (2007) in London, the United Kingdom; the British Higher School of Art and Design (2009-2011) in Moscow, Russia; followed by a BA in Video Art at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (2013-2017) in Moscow, Russia. The artist has exhibited at various national and international venues and has participated in the Oxford International Art Fair in Oxford and the 6th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg, Russia. In 2023, Elena Bulycheva founded 146 Contemporary—a non-profit organization and exhibition platform that invites renowned curators and aims to support emerging artists in Hamburg—as a curatorial extension of her artistic practice. By doing so, the artist is once more revisiting the domestic and the public, the everyday and the artistic, by practicing art in a domestic environment.