About
Ukrainian contemporary art, curated and scored.
Our story
International collectors have always known to look for talent before it surfaces. The harder challenge is finding a reliable signal when there are no auction records, no press trail, and no shared methodology for evaluating what "promising" actually means. For Ukrainian contemporary artists — a field with genuine depth and growing international institutional attention, but limited visibility in private collecting — that information gap is structural, not incidental.
ART Index was built to close it. We combine curator-led selection with a transparent scoring methodology — five dimensions, each defined and publicly disclosed — so that a collector in New York or Amsterdam encounters each work with the same quality-grounding that comes from real due diligence, not editorial taste alone. Every artist on this platform has been reviewed, scored, and documented. The score isn't our opinion; it's a structured reading of observable signals.
Curator
Alina Ihnatieva
My approach to curation developed through years of close contact with Ukrainian contemporary art — through institutions, studios, and the international conversation about where this field stands. I understood what was missing not from a structural analysis but from individual encounters: artists with rigorous, sustained practices who simply were not visible to the collectors who would have valued them.
What I look for goes beyond what a score can capture: the quality of attention an artist brings to their materials over time. Whether a body of work is asking a coherent question rather than just producing coherent objects. Whether the work holds your attention without explaining itself. I use these signals alongside the documented criteria when I decide what belongs here.
Why I'm doing this
“I'm building the curatorial infrastructure I wished existed when I was trying to advocate for these artists beyond Ukraine's borders.”
— Alina Ihnatieva, Curator, ART Index
Co-founder
Stanislav Lysokon
I came to this problem from outside the art world — which meant I saw the market gap before I understood the cultural one. Ukrainian artists were absent from international private collecting in a way that seemed disproportionate to the quality of the work. The structural explanation, when I found it, was simpler than I expected: no trusted information layer.
Methodology matters to me because I've watched what happens without it. Prices become arbitrary, quality signals are captured by those with gallery connections rather than those with the strongest work, and buyers who would engage can't calibrate their risk. Transparency isn't an ideological position — it's the minimum infrastructure for a functioning market.
This platform is for collectors willing to do proper due diligence if someone gives them the tools — and for artists who deserve to be evaluated on their work, not their connections.
— Stanislav Lysokon, Co-founder, ART Index
What we stand for
Our principles
- 01Methodology over opinion
- Every score on this platform is derived from a publicly-disclosed rubric, not a curator's preference. We tell you exactly what we measured and how we weighted it. Then you decide.
- 02Curation over volume
- We list fewer artists than any comparable platform. Every artist has passed a documented review against five criteria. Quality is the constraint; volume was never the goal.
- 03The artist as a professional
- We document, score, and represent artists the way a serious gallery would — not as cultural ambassadors or stories to be told, but as skilled practitioners with measurable careers and work that stands on its own.
- 04Transparency as infrastructure
- Full methodology, full documentation, confidence index disclosed. We show you where our data is thin and why — because uncertainty acknowledged is more useful than false precision.
As seen in
Press & partners
Coverage and partnerships coming soon.