Polina Bertou is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Visually informed by references encompassing the language of cartooning, art history, and literature, their work strives for uncanny recompositions of familiar echos and aims to use the absurd to reflect the gamut of emotions in the oscillation between despair and hope. Bertou works across various painting approaches, allowing the different modes of making to interact and inform one another, collapsing binaries of artistic genres and cultural narratives they hold.

Polina Bertou (1988) was born in the Ural region of the USSR, grew up mostly in the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn (Munsee Lenape land). They received a BFA from the University of Washington (2013) and an MFA from Hunter College (2021). Bertou has exhibited their work in New York City, Seattle, Oregon, and Germany and was featured on the cover of the New American Paintings magazine in 2022. Recent group exhibitions include Tokiko at studio e gallery in Seattle, WA, Think Before You Print at Galerie von Empfangshalle, Munich, Germany and Running Joke, The EFArts, New York, NY.