ZAEBARO

What is Zaebaro?

Zaebaro is where my inner world takes physical form.

It is the place where my paintings, sculptures, writing and objects coexist.

Every work belongs to the same universe. Some become paintings. Some become sculptures. Some become wearable objects. Some remain stories.

Nothing begins with a blank canvas. Every work grows from something that existed long before I understood it.

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Artist

My name is Violetta Polt.

I’m a multidisciplinary artist born in Russia, shaped by more than a decade in Japan, and currently based in Washington, USA.

I work across painting, sculpture, writing and wearable art, treating each medium as a different language used to explore the same inner world.

In 2023, I held my first solo exhibition, Undress Me Mentally, at Rikka Gallery in Tokyo.

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My Process

I don’t paint ideas.

I paint first and understand later.

My paintings often reveal emotions or memories I wasn’t consciously aware of until they existed on the canvas.

Painting is how I discover what I couldn’t yet put into words.

Sometimes the canvas understands me before I do.

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The Beginning

I drew constantly as a child.

At eleven years old, I entered art school in Russia. I often resisted formal education because I believed art should be the place where I could rest my soul.

One teacher, who also happened to be the school’s principal, saw something worth protecting in me. His encouragement stayed with me long after I left.

Years later, while living in Hollywood, I began creating the body of work that would eventually become Zaebaro.

Only after living in Tokyo, and later moving to Los Angeles, did I begin to understand where many of those images had come from.

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Recurring Figures

Some figures return throughout my work.

They are not fictional characters.

They represent different stages of becoming.

Gaman (我慢)

Gaman first appeared when I was twelve years old.

Sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table, I painted a screaming black face with red bubbles trapped inside its mouth.

I didn’t know it then, but Gaman would keep returning whenever life became too heavy to carry. After losing a friend to suicide. After losing the grandmother who raised me to cancer. When the war in Ukraine began. In moments of grief, fear and devastation, I found myself painting the same face again and again.

It took me more than a decade of living in Japan, and later moving to Los Angeles, to understand what I had been painting all along.

Gaman carries everything inside—pain, fear, grief, anger and words left unspoken.

Rather than expressing them, Gaman absorbs them, believing that enduring is strength.

For many years, Gaman was how I survived.

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Bushi (武士)

Bushi was born after more than a decade of Gaman, shortly after my daughter Iris was born.

Becoming a mother changed the way I carried everything I had been holding inside for so many years.

Bushi doesn’t deny pain, grief, fear or anger.

She allows herself to experience it fully.

Bushi marks the moment when survival is no longer enough.

She is who Gaman became.

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Ai-chan

Ai-chan is the next chapter.

She explores anger—not as something to suppress or fear, but as something to understand and befriend.

She allows herself to feel rage without shame while learning how to express it without harming herself or others.

She is another stage of transformation.

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Projects

Beyond painting, Zaebaro continues to grow through sculptures, wearable art, writing, conceptual works such as Kage47, and, eventually, film and television.

Each project explores the same universe through a different medium.

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Philosophy

I don’t create collections.

I take my inner world and give it physical form for you to enter and discover something of your own.

Every painting, sculpture, object and story is another doorway into the same universe.

Zaebaro is that universe.

It is still growing.