In May 1992 Marina Skugareva and Oleh Tistol received grants from the Christoph Merian Stiftung fund within the cultural exchange program and left for Basel, where they lived until 1993.

The Swiss artists Suzette Beck, Ronald Wüthrich, and Ilse Ermen became good friends of Marina and later even the heroes of her paintings.

Since the late 1980s, Marina Skugareva has participated regularly in exhibitions of modern art in Kyiv, Moscow, Warsaw, Basel, Berlin, Odense.

For the artist this theme emerges from traditions of an expressionism, but Marina's expressions are not only the visible emotions, but also a manner of vision, a search of "another point of view", a way of preservation of "the real present life" in space of the art devastated by infinite citations and reproduction.

The painter transforms the oblong canvases ("Ronald", "Radio-gramophone", "Evening news"), cut across by the long near-empty tables, with the portraits of characters fixed on a conditional wall above, into the collision of several realities: the interior with the painting is continued in itself and the subjects represented in a picture are tested on reliability, so that glasses and chairs are made to seem more real than portraits.

The underlined fragmentariness and simplicity combine with bright intensity of colour to give a special semantic significance and free figurative breath to these works.

Texts represent the infinite women's conversations and images fix the forms of a human movement and frozen emotions.