Can Kings Do It All?

A solo exhibit by Larysa Pukhanova has opened at the Obraz Art Gallery in Kyiv, and any visitor can see that “prophets have not vanished yet in our homeland,” to quote a line from Shevchenko. The artist paints her homeland, her native Kyiv. Her canvases capture the city’s various corners as if caught off-guard in the happiest moments of life. Parks, streets, trees, and buildings seem to have acquired souls, captivating us, the viewers, with their depth and beauty. Sometimes it seems as though each of them is telling a story of time travel instead of being filled with the author’s sense and understanding of the significance of any particular building, so organic is the bond between the artist and her models.

Landscapes are not Larysa Pukhanova’s only specialty, and every so often she produces still lifes. However, on close examination of her works you will find that the term that means “dead nature” is an inadequate definition for Pukhanova’s paintings. All the objects in her canvases are like real actors who perform their roles masterfully, sometimes even without the author’s knowledge. Pukhanova has a painting called “White King,” which features a stalemate on a chessboard, where the king is a sculpture (by Vadym Zhukovsky). The painting immediately found a buyer, and another customer ordered the “White King” after seeing a picture of it on the Internet. But Larysa never produces identical copies, and the new painting was different from the original one. Imagine Pukhanova’s surprise when she learned that the customer refused to accept the painting because in the new “game of chess” the whites were losing. After this incident she bought a book of chess problems to brush up on her knowledge of this complex and treacherous game.

Pukhanova’s paintings never gather dust in her studio. Far from it: they are enriching the collections of both public and private institutions and private collectors both in Ukraine and abroad - Germany, Israel, Canada, the USA, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.