Ukrainian project in Paris

Three Ukrainian artists – Anton Solomukha, Oleh Tistol, and Viktor Sydorenko – have displayed their works at the Paris-based Galerie Albert Benamou, one of the most prestigious galleries in Europe. Over the past 40 years, this gallery has revealed such names as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Joel-Peter Witkin, Irwin Olaf, the Gao Brothers, and many others. Albert Benamou is called, aptly enough, the “great trail-blazer” because his unprecedented intuition has allowed him to predict the hottest trends in global art for half a century now. At Galerie Albert Benamou, Solomukha, Tistol, and Sydorenko are presenting their own expositions, each of them taking a special view of Ukraine.

Solomukha is exhibiting the “Red Riding Hood Visited Chornobyl” project he created in 2009. In a macabre decoration of the Prypiat and Chornobyl, Solomukha shows the ironic visual allegories of the classic paintings kept at the Louvre, one of the world’s main treasuries of high art. The series is executed in the genre of “photo painting” which the author invented in the early 2000s, when he, a pupil of Professor Tetiana Yablonska, made photography his main creative instrument, still remaining a follower of the “painting-style principles” of composition and figurativeness.

Tistol has brought to Paris a set of works from his famous PBK series which he has been working on in 2006. In this series, the artist iconizes the palm tree as a symbol of the “Ukrainian paradise” localized at the intersection of geography, memory, the Crimean land, and the nostalgic images of the Crimea as a Soviet-era sun spot.

The artist, curator and art theoretician Sydorenko is presenting works from his “Levitation” cycle (2009), in which optical illusions and a color-filled painted space creates a field for all kinds of metaphors – from the expression of inner freedom to the specific condition of an uncertain Ukrainian identity – and the lingering crisis seems to be either increasing or, on the contrary, fading against the backdrop of an all-pervading cultural globalization. The exhibit also displays a video from the “Millstones of Time” project with which Sydorenko represented Ukraine at the 50th Venice Biennale of Modern Art in 2003.

The Ukrainian project at Galerie Albert Benamou is carried out with the assistance of Black Square Gallery (Miami) and art dealer Ihor Abramovych (Art Agent UKR Gallery), reportedly by [email protected].