New exhibition opens at the Children’s Academy of Arts
Themes and Variations, in fact, are works by two Kyiv artists, sculptor Svitlana Karunska and graphics designer Olena Yanovska. The ensemble of sculpture and graphics shown is, of course, a chamber one. Simultaneously, the exposition obviously shows gracious lightness of either a pen and ink drawing or an old melody of, say, for a lute.
Incidentally, speaking about lutes. At the current exhibition Svitlana Karunska has finally introduced to each other her three lute players, as well as two Dancing Pierrots . In general, for her Themes and Variations the sculptor selected in the main works relating to music and the theater like her Flutist and Little Fiddler . Even the sad Flying Dutchman , after all, reminds us of Wagner, and Fowler of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (though Ms. Karunska herself insists that it is all quite the opposite, Wagner has nothing to do with it, and Mozart is a big mystery). Her Girl with a Bird with complete naturalness meets the Blue Bird Seekers of Olena Yanovska’s graphics cycle. Karunska is a romantic sculptor. Her works miraculously unite faith and doubt. As a romantic, she believes in dreams, as a sculptor (dealing with tactile material and real life), she has her doubts if not in life’s expediency or freedom from sin, then in its necessity. That is why even her best lute player bending her head with a horned hennin is hiding within an insulting but piercing grain of bitterness.
Olena Yanovska’s graphics constitutes a link in a chain of all kinds of creative experiments. It is enough to mention that in her lifetime the artist has worked in the fields of theater and playbills, and now she has taken up print designs. Simultaneously, her graphics is a similar chain of experimentation. Even Themes and Variations, including the fantastic web full of kind-hearted irony that constitutes her Dacha Memories, where languid young ladies wearing hats and striped stockings (and even, as it seems, corsets), devote themselves to relaxation in the open air, and Blue Bird ’s multicolored storm where Maeterlinck’s heroes’ symbolic discouragement come across impetuosity and elusiveness of a fairy tale dream and at the same time the completely relaxed quality of a child’s drawing. However, it is no mere coincidence that Olena Yanovska works in cycles. Perhaps the exhibition’s title refers more to her graphics than to Svitlana Karunska’s sculpture. At least, it is precisely she who, having chosen two not only different but opposite subjects, extract from them a whole chain of variations.
