Leyla Nobatova
FOMO
FOMO
Round, diameter 20", Acrylic on canvas, Acrylic marker
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About

Leyla Nobatova

Leyla Nobatova is a contemporary abstract artist whose practice examines the psychological and emotional structures that shape human experience: love, loss, memory, desire, uncertainty, and resilience.

Born in Turkmenistan, raised in Ukraine, and based in San Francisco, Nobatova developed her relationship with art from an early age in a family of visual artists. Her practice is informed by a cross-cultural perspective and by an ongoing interest in the ways personal experience can become something universally recognizable.

Working primarily with acrylic, Japanese ink, and mixed media, Nobatova combines geometric structure with expressive gesture, bold contours, color, and symbolic forms. Her paintings emerge through a process of layering, revision, and accumulation, balancing control with spontaneity.

Her practice unfolds through interconnected series, each conceived as a new chapter within an unfinished body of work. Rather than illustrating specific events, Nobatova transforms lived experience into open-ended visual narratives that invite multiple interpretations.

After more than a decade working in technology, she returned her primary focus to art, bringing with her an analytical approach that continues to inform her visual practice.

Nobatova's work is created for both private and institutional contexts and is available for collection, exhibition, and select collaborations.

Artist Statement

An Unfinished Book

I see my practice as an unfinished book about the human condition. Each series begins with a question shaped by lived experience and develops into a visual investigation of what it means to love, lose, hope, remember, and begin again.

Through abstraction, I translate psychological and emotional states into visual language. Geometry, color, rhythm, and symbolic forms become ways of exploring what cannot always be expressed through words. The paintings are not illustrations of particular events, but spaces where personal experience can become something more universal.

Each body of work forms a new chapter. Relationships, uncertainty, memory, identity, expectation, rupture, and resilience appear and reappear in different forms, connected by an underlying tension between what we try to control and what life asks us to accept.

My process moves between intuition and structure. Layers of acrylic, Japanese ink, and mixed media are built, disrupted, revised, and accumulated over time. Bold contours and recurring forms create a sense of order, while gesture, transparency, and interruption introduce instability. The resulting tension reflects the way we experience life itself: simultaneously searching for certainty and learning to live without it.

At the center of my work is a question of what remains after disruption. I am drawn to the moment when pain, uncertainty, or loss can become the beginning of something else.

For me, hope is not an escape from darkness. It is an act of continuing through it.

CV

Exhibitions & Background

A full CV is available as a downloadable PDF.

Download CV (PDF)