Alla Horska grew up in a Russian-speaking family. She began consciously speaking and studying Ukrainian as an adult, practicing by writing dictations. Her first works were dedicated to the hard labor of coal miners and were immediately exhibited at All-Union art shows. However, the fame of a Soviet artist did not attract her — she immersed herself in Ukrainian culture.

Between 1961 and 1965, together with Les Taniuk, Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Svitlychny, and other Sixtiers, Horska co-founded the Club of Creative Youth Suchasnyk in Kyiv, which soon became a center of Ukrainian national life. She actively organized literary and artistic evenings, preparations for Shevchenko’s events, and art exhibitions. Horska discovered and studied Ukrainian folk art with the help of Ivan Honchar.

Horska was a co-author of the stained-glass panel Shevchenko. Mother, created at the Red Building of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv University together with Opanas Zalyvakha, Liudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk, and Halyna Zubchenko. The stained-glass was destroyed by order of the Party authorities, who deemed it ideologically hostile and incompatible with the principles of socialist realism. Horska and Semykina were expelled from the Union of Artists of Ukraine.

She could not remain indifferent to the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals in 1965, so she sent protests to the prosecutor’s office. In every way she tried to support the families of political prisoners with words, money, presence at trials, and by organizing meetings with those returning from labor camps. Horska was summoned for interrogations and preventive talks. Her apartment on Tereshchenkivska Street, a gathering place for dissidents, was constantly surveilled. In 1970, she refused to testify against arrested historian Valentyn Moroz and soon wrote a letter of protest to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, condemning the illegality and cruelty of the verdict. On December 2, 1970, Horska’s body, with a crushed skull, was found in the house of her father-in-law Ivan Zaretskyi, whose own body had been discovered a day earlier on a railway track in Fastiv (decapitated). The investigation “concluded” that Horska had been killed by her father-in-law due to “deep personal hostility” and closed the case following his death. Authorities delayed permission for her burial; the funeral was held only on December 7.

Alla Horska’s artistic legacy includes paintings, monumental works, graphic art, and sketches. Her art grew from the traditions of the Kyiv academic school, folk art, the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s, the Boichukist movement, and a profound knowledge of global artistic trends.

Her works are preserved in the collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv), the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine, the Museum of the Sixtiers (Kyiv), the Berlin Wall Museum – Checkpoint Charlie, and the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at Rutgers University (one of the world’s largest collections of nonconformist art from the former USSR), among others.