Between Scylla and Charybdis

A painting project now demonstrated at the Palace of Arts has brought together artists from Kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Gdansk. They develop the Ukrainian artistic tradition in a formal way without limiting their subjects to the themes of national history, ethnography, and everyday life. The author of the project is painter Halyna NOVOZHENETS, Ph.D., art historian, teacher at the Lviv Academy of Arts. She acquainted the public with the paintings by Andrii Mentukh, Petro Honchar, Viktor Pohorielov, Serhii Savchenko, Roman Romanyshyn, and Dmytro Stetsko, and her own works are also part of the display.

“The idea of such an exposition took shape a year and a half ago,” shared Novozhenets to The Day. “As a modern painter and teacher of art, I visit a lot of exhibit, and I dare say that Ukraine has many highly professional painters. But our Ukrainian art is gradually accepting things which appeared, let’s say, 20 years ago in Germany and Austria, and later in Poland. And we are very happy that we have made such a great progress in art. But in fact we are losing our national line. I believe that being modern, progressive, and contemporary does not mean following in someone else’s footsteps. You must speak your own words. I have gathered authors from all over Ukraine. By the way, it was not such an easy task, because there are not so many artists whose ambition is to develop the Ukrainian artistic tradition in painting. Actually, not at the level of themes or some ethnic things, but purely formally. I would love to see that Ukrainian art has its own face and at the same time is absolutely modern and integrated into European art. As a teacher at the Academy of Arts, I certainly want to see Ukrainian art above the trite stereotypes, yet at the same time I want it to have its own Ukrainian code on the professional level.”

Novozhenets said she wanted to open the project in Kyiv, but could not do it since the capital “is way too much commercialized.” Nevertheless she is set to continue developing the idea by inviting other interesting artists into the project (in particular, 30-40-year-olds) and by trying to bring the exhibit to other cities in order to draw the artistic community’s attention to this theme, to the project’s goals.

The opening of the exhibit “In Search of Identity” was crowded. Among those present were art historians, critics, painters, teachers from the Academy of Arts, publishers, writers – just to name a few.

“I am absolutely positively impressed by the exhibit. It feels as though they have passed between Scylla and Charybdis,” shares Liubov KYIANOVSKA, professor, Lviv Music Academy. “The displayed works have fresh ideas, curious conceptual solutions, moreover, the paintings have an exceptionally positive color scheme. In my opinion, this is a breakthrough into the next style, which we will not call ‘postmodern,’ and it will have a different creative and constructive idea. It seems that similar processes are now observed in music as well. First of all, this is what is being done by our genius Myroslav Skoryk, as well as by Viktor Kaminskyi, Oleksandr Kozarenko, Bohdana Froliak, Yuri Laniuk, or Ostap Manuliak. They actually have also chosen for a similar path, instead of pure avant-garde, and they are looking for that combination of the past with the challenges of the present. That is how they have both the tune and the melodic idea. If I were asked to choose background music for this exhibit, I would suggest Skoryk’s Oboe Concerto, Kaminsky’s cantata ‘Chyhryne, Chyhryne,’ and Kozarenko’s chamber cantata ‘Pierrot Looping the Loop,’ the premiere of which was sung by the unforgettable Vasyl Slipak.”

“The art project ‘In Search of Identity’ is realized in Lviv after the grand Show of Promises with a substantially different culture-creating program, where the contemporary artistic process was revealed as some kind of a market of ideas on various (and often absurd) social demands,” remarks art history professor Roman YATSIV. “Contrary to that, the program by Halyna Novozhenets, who is the curator of this exhibit by seven Ukrainian authors, is based on the fundamental concept of Identity as an important factor, a conscious artistic quest for senses in contemporary artistic forms. With such a vision on the nature of creativity, the esthetic component is motivated by spiritual and ethic factors as integral constructs of the author’s worldview. This is clearly perceptible in the work of each of the participants of this artistic project, notwithstanding all the differences in their views on the formal language of imagery and the methodology of painting. That is why the works by Honchar, Mentukh, Novozhenets, Pohorielov, Romanyshyn, Savchenko, and Stetsko crosses crucial paths of ethnogenetic formation, catching those syncretic stimuli which actually constitute the integral spiritual, philosophic, ethic, and sacral tradition. The exhibited works will induce the viewer to contemplate the complicated transformations of thinking which are found in the renowned figures of the contemporary national Ukrainian art.”

The public can fathom the fundamental concept of Identity in Halyna Novozhenets’ project, presented at the Lviv Palace of Arts through August 6.