He studied at the Republican Art High School named after Taras Shevchenko, later at the painting faculty of the Kyiv State Art Institute. In the late 1980s he became one of the participants in the art squat "Paris Commune", which became the center of the formation of Ukrainian contemporary art of the independence era.
The early period of Golosiy's work (1987–1988) is characterized by monochrome painting with a predominance of self-portraits, everyday scenes and restrained landscapes, executed in an almost grisaille manner with sculptural plasticity of form. Later, the artist turned to Christian themes and the aesthetics of neo-expressionism. During a plein air in Sedniv in 1989, he created a number of key works, including "Yellow Room", "Monologues", "Sleeping in the Garden of Gethsemane", "Lamentation", "Easter Lamentations", "Atonement", in which he combined an expressive style of writing, existential motifs and the quotation of art history characteristic of postmodernism.
In the early 1990s, he formed his own poetic world with fictional characters, zoomorphic images, and dream motifs, working on the paintings "To Sergei", "No need, Sergei", "The Death of Nikolai Berezkin", "Towards Each Other", "The Tragedy of a Young Sparrow", "Flying Hares", "Good", "Psychedelic Attack of the Blue Rabbits", "Triple Self-Portrait", "Flowers on Stilts". After an art residency in Munich (1992), he turned to a series of appropriation paintings, in which he used cinematic techniques borrowed from visual culture and art history. The artist's latest works, in particular "Embankment", "Rider", "Versta", "Troika" and "Eyes", are marked by an increase in psychedelic imagery, a sense of anxiety and existential tension.
Holosii participated in numerous exhibitions of Ukrainian contemporary art in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His work became one of the key phenomena of the “new wave” generation, and after his death, the artist’s works were repeatedly exhibited at personal and collective exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad.
The works of Oleg Holosii are kept in museum and private collections in Ukraine and abroad, in particular in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, as well as in collections of contemporary Ukrainian art.Oleg Holosii is one of the central figures of Ukrainian art of the late 20th century. His work became one of the most striking embodiments of the aesthetics of the Ukrainian “new wave”, combining neo-expressionism, trans-avant-garde and postmodern imagery with exceptional pictorial freedom, intuitiveness and individual myth-making.