Ukrainian-born, Swiss-based visual artist Julia Wimmerlin has spent over a decade navigating the evolving landscape of photography, shifting from travel imagery to contemporary fine art and mixed media.
After leaving her native Kyiv, she lived and worked across Europe and Asia - experiences that shaped her layered visual perspective and cross-cultural sensibility. With academic degrees in Economics and Marketing, Julia began her career in international marketing, later transitioning to photography in 2014. Largely self-taught, she drew on her background in advertising to craft clear impactful visual stories.
The upheavals of the early 2020s profoundly altered her creative path. With the pandemic, travel became impossible; with the war in Ukraine, reality itself became unbearable to photograph. She could no longer face the world through a documentary lens. Julia needed a new way to see—a coping mechanism, a space where she could still create. So she began to invent her own world. What began as an external gaze turned inward, catalyzing a transformation in both process and purpose. Her current work reflects this introspective turn: a search for meaning within uncertainty, and a commitment to investigating the self in relation to an unstable world. Julia's main themes examine identity, perception, and the shifting nature of reality and memory.
This period marked not only a deepening of her conceptual inquiry but also a conscious redefinition of her visual language. Aesthetically, her images have evolved from vibrant, concrete scenes into symbolic compositions that hover between abstraction and figuration. Dream logic, ambiguous figuration, and the poetic use of color and light, become her tools. This transformation wasn’t a stylistic decision—it was a necessity. When the world fractured, she built a parallel one. Dreams became a state of internal displacement where memory, identity, and perception unravel and reassemble. They don’t belong only to the night; they filter into daily life, shaping how she sees and moves through the world. As in Guillermo del Toro's "Pan’s Labyrinth" or Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful", imagination became a protective space—a parallel reality where pain and confusion could be transformed into something beautiful.
Julia's photographs often function as portals—windows into the subconscious, where the fantastical merges with the intimate. Feminine, elusive, and emotionally charged, her works aren't an escape from reality but a way to make space for what remains unseen.
Julia's photographs often function as portals—windows into the subconscious, where the fantastical merges with the intimate. Feminine, elusive, and emotionally charged, her works aren't an escape from reality but a way to make space for what remains unseen.
This path has precedents. In times of rupture, artists often turned inward: Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, sensing the approach of the First World War, translated collective anxiety and personal turmoil into psychological symbolism; Giorgio de Chirico and Marc Chagall did the same after the war; the Surrealists—Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington—transformed trauma into myth; and later, Francesca Woodman and Duane Michals in photography sought truth in the subconscious. Julia's work follows that same lineage—using imagination and dream logic to rebuild meaning when reality no longer holds.
Julia’s photographs have been published in various prestigious publications including New York Times, National Geographic, GEO, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, Forbes and Le Figaro, amongst others. Her works have been exposed in Canada, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ukraine and USA. She was awarded the title “Photographer of the Year” at the Moscow International Photo Awards and has achieved winning placements in competitions such as the International Photo Awards, Tokyo International Photo Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris, amongst others. Additionally, she has been shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards.
Julia is a resident artist 2025 in Galerie Calabrò, Zurich, Switzerland.
