12-year Old Artist

The Irene Gallery opened a one-man show by Petro Hronsky, a fourth grader, fine arts faculty, Kyiv Children’s Academy of Art. The author is only twelve, and the Irene display includes his paintings, prints, and sculptural works. Perhaps the most interesting and, without doubt, the most attractive specificity of Petro Hronsky’s creativeness is a completely limited and even harmonious combination of his purely juvenile keen power of observation and perfectly uninhibited imagining with an already attained sizable professional basis. In other words, this is a boy who was taught but not spoiled, not turned into an underdone adult. After the first personal exhibit they usually discuss an artist, but this artist — including in his works — luckily did not stop being a child. And his mother sitting on a couch (artist Natalia Hronska) or his grandmother, reading, or the Swallow’s Nest, or a Carpathian church appear in the same time and space with a crowd of merrily dancing crayfish, fish, and cats, just as Cossacks are in the same time and space with New York skyscrapers, and all those depicted feel great and quite natural.