“New Old Masters” exhibit at the Lviv Art Gallery
Initiated by the founder of Hudimov Art Project (holding company) Pavlo HUDIMOV, this fine art project aims at reducing the distance between art and museum, and, as a result, between art and audience.
“I would like to enliven museum life in Ukraine, so that the museum will turn from an art cemetery into a dynamic institution, which will attract audience like a magnet,” Hudimov said at the opening ceremony. “The ‘New Old Masters’ project has two complementary goals, as it allows us to unlock storage chambers of the Lviv Art Gallery and show works of people who were making art 100, 200, 300 years ago, as well as to show works of contemporary artists who will soon become classics and will serve as a model for the artists of the future.”
The exhibition includes two dozen paintings (mostly anonymous) from the 17th and 18th centuries collection of the Lviv Art Gallery as well as the works of contemporary artists – painters Olena Poliashchenko, Oleksii Kolesnikov, Yevhen Ravsky, Volodymyr Kostyrko, Pavlo Makov, Mykola Kolomiiets, Artem Volokitin, Yaroslav Prysiazhniuk and sculptor Sadan. They represent several cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv. According to the organizers’ idea, such arrangement of paintings creates a dialogue between the old and modern painters, which all visitors are invited to listen to.
According to a Lviv gallery owner Yurko Boiko, the “New Old Masters” exhibition’s value lies in the return of contemporary artists to the so-called conservatism, or traditional, classical art painting school: “Conservative movement is gaining momentum not only in Ukraine, but in the whole world, because artists have finally realized that further developments in the so-called actual, conceptual art would only lead them into a blind alley.”
The exhibition will stay in Lviv until September 4, and then move to Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv and Kharkiv. However, Hudimov thinks that the project has a far longer way ahead.
It should be noted that this is not the first attempt to launch a dialogue between, on the one hand, art treasures that are stored at the Lviv Art Gallery and its branches in the castles of Lviv oblast, and, on the other hand, works of contemporary art. Let us recall that four years ago the gallery’s curator of the 19th and 20th centuries European art Viktoria Susak had a similar project in cooperation with Dmytro Shelest Foundation, which was exhibited in commemoration of the gallery’s centenary and eloquently titled “Re-Animation.”
