DALLAS, TX.- An intimate portrait of Ukrainian teacher Elena Kurilo, injured last month during a Russian missile strike on Chuguev, will be offered by Heritage Auctions to benefit the Ukrainian Red Cross Society.

The image has come to define the human toll of Russia’s invasion, along with the resilience of the Ukrainian people. The painting by renowned artist and educator Zhenya Gershman, along with photojournalist Wolfgang Schwan’s original photograph of Kurilo, will be offered by Heritage Auctions March 15-29 in an online sale, with 100 percent of the proceeds directly benefitting the Ukrainian Red Cross Society’s humanitarian relief efforts.

Schwan’s photograph of Kurilo – her head wrapped in gauze, her face encrusted in blood, her pale blue eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare – has been featured on countless front pages and news broadcasts around the world since Russian troops invaded Ukraine last month. The Philadelphia photojournalist took the picture on Feb. 25, moments after the 52-year-old teacher’s home in the Kharkiv region had been obliterated by a Russian air strike.

Within hours, Kurilo’s marred face appeared around the world beneath headlines that blared “Putin Invades,” “The Bloodshed Begins,” “Bloody Hell.”

“People were seeing the horrors of war on day one,” Schwan said during a Zoom call from Ukraine this week. “In hours you’re seeing the civilians, the bystanders of this conflict, are the ones suffering the most. In any conflict it’s most important to highlight the suffering of the people who aren’t active participants in it, and that helps inform the world of her suffering and that of the civilians caught in this horror.”

Some 6,400 miles away, in her Los Angeles home, Gershman was among the untold millions who saw Schwan’s portrait of Elena Kurilo. “And it spoke to me.”




The granddaughter of poet and lyricist Mikhail Matusovosky, Gershman was born in Moscow, though her mother’s family came from Ukraine’s Donbas Region, where her grandfather’s museum was founded and his statue stands in the square. Gershman had her first exhibition in St. Petersburg when she was 14, but her parents immigrated to the United States because they “believed that the artist should be able to express themselves freely and without fear,” she said.

Gershman is perhaps best known for having twice been selected by The Recording Academy to create portraits of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, when the musicians were honored by the MusiCares Foundation. Her works often sell in the six-figure range, and have been featured in galleries and private collections worldwide.

The war began on her birthday, Feb. 24, which Gershman spent in front of the television – “paralyzed by horror,” she said. The next day, she saw Schwan’s photograph of the bandaged, bloodied teacher.

“Through your image, Wolfgang, Elena spoke to me,” the painter told the photographer over Zoom. “All I knew was, I had to paint her. I chose even more of a closeup – even more intimate, straight into her face. She’s close enough in age to me that I can imagine this could be me; she’s also a teacher, and I’m a teacher. I didn’t see a woman. I saw this battlefield on her face.”

Filmmaker Adrian Roup, a friend of Gershman’s in Los Angeles, encouraged her to share the 12 inch-by-14 inch painting with Schwan through his Instagram account. Fortuitously, Schwan, who is still working in Ukraine, opened Gershman’s message – one among the thousands he has received since his photograph of Kurilo was initially published.

Roup also connected the painter with Heritage, the Dallas-based auction house. Within hours, Gershman and Schwan agreed to auction her painting and his photograph to benefit the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, which is providing desperately needed humanitarian aid.

“Zhenya’s interpretation of this iconic image forces us to focus on the human toll of war, its immutable impact on humanity,” says Joshua Benesh, Chief Strategy Officer at Heritage Auctions. “It is not a charitable effort that risks glamorizing the act of charity or somehow further attenuating us from the reason for humanitarian relief efforts, but rather one that confronts the fundamental truth that we need to have this conversation because the people of Ukraine are suffering.”

“I believe in the power of art,” Gershman said. “I believe a simple act of painting the truth can change the world. I am a total idealist. And I knew something good would come out of it.”