From abstraction to Zhlobology

This format gives a possibility and space for better communication between museums, galleries, art centers, independent tutors, and actual artists. In total Mystetsky Arsenal presented over 30 art projects created by authors from different regions of Ukraine.

The main exhibit is opened by the Platform of young artists. The project called “Industrial Eden” from a group of young artists including Anton Lohov, Danylo Shumikhin, Stepan Riabchenko, Yurii Syvyryn, and Yaroslav Solop addresses the problem of socialization. In authors’ opinion, the civilized world starts looking like a huge factory where everyone wants to work in production or processing. The social protection is tightly related to the level of integration into the anthropogenic world. It seems that beyond its borders nobody is able to normally adapt. So, in order to feel the lucky ones, most of the people of the Earth want to create their own industrial Eden at home.

The participants of another group project “Ignorance is power” prove that at the age of the information society the classical slogan “knowledge is power” is outdated. Today we do not have time to master the whole amount of knowledge and information created and accumulated over the previous historical periods. In the situation when everything has been invented and described ignorance remains nearly the only possibility for creativity – it opens the way to combine the incompatible, re-invent the well-known and to combine and synthesize. The young artists prove it with their own example: probably, the degreed biologist and today’s street artist with a pseudonym APL315 and degreed philosophers Oleh Oliinyk and Volodymyr Vorotniov owe their artistic achievements to the absence of special artistic education.

Quite well-known International Symposium of Modern Art “Biriuchy” presented the project of the tutors Serhii Kantsedal and Natalia Matsenko “Survival Zone.” Started in 2006 as a collective creative laboratory, this year “Biriuchy” gathered over 100 artists. “Survival Zone” includes a series of films by the young director Yurii Yefanov about their work and the works by Roman Minin, Stepan Riabchenko, and Oleksii Yaloveha.

The exhibit “The artists are drawing” (A4 paper and a ball pen) is the result of the efforts of the Kyiv gallery dealer Yevhen Karas and the influential collector Ihor Voronov. The project started in 2006 has transformed into the biggest world collection of ball pen drawings (over 1,000 sheets). In Arsenal Karas exhibited the best works of this unique block of graphics, an amazing evidence of the resourcefulness of the artists having only a ball pen and standard office paper at hand.

Except young artists, Mystetsky Arsenal also displays the representatives of the older generation who came in the 1980s-1990s: post-modernists Arsen Savadov and Oleksandr Roitburd, abstractionists Anatolii Kryvolap and Tiberii Silvashy, light and funny Vladyslav Shereshevsky with his gallery of media images MediaFace. Stylizer and joker, master of a quasi-realistic portraits Shereshevsky paints TV stars’ faces in a traditional way with oil paints on the canvas and suggests the viewers thinking about their individuality.

In general, expressive ironic compositions are the best remembered.

The union “Zhlob-Art” [Slob-Art. – Ed.] headed by Antin Mukharsky exhibits 300 works by slob artists (Ivan Semesiuk, Andrii Yermolenko, Serhii Koliada, Stas Voliazlovsky and others): paintings, graphic works, installations and the catalog called Zhlobology that contains 33 essays of the Ukrainian writers, artists, and culture experts describing the phenomenon of gimmies. The ongoing performance at the opening of Art Kyiv Contemporary is the incarnation of esthetics declared by the participants of the union: behind the bars two artists are quite naturally playing the roles of “boyos in the neighborhood” and a corpulent lady is selling “siemky” (sunflower seeds) nearby. Mukharsky and his friends assure that this exhibit is the last one in the history of their union.

The “Soviet Mandala” by Anatolii Hankevych consists of painted copies of Soviet-time carpets. The means of noise insulation for the inhabitants of Khrushchyovkas, where the walls were too thin, scarce and amazingly expensive commodities, carpets quickly turned into a Soviet luxury articles, just like the Czech crystal and the German dishes. At the end of the day, the carpet was bound to become one of the main symbols of that time as every family album has portraits with a carpet on the background. If the exhibit had an award for the funniest hall, it would be undoubtedly given to Hankevych.

Simultaneously with the main exhibit Art Kyiv Contemporary Mystetsky Arsenal also organized an innovative educational project for children and teenagers called “The Arsenal of Ideas” that will gather in the creative, scientific, and innovative laboratories the state-of-the-art educational and developmental programs and technologies, created by the leading teachers, scientists, and artists to unlock children’s talents and stimulate their creative thinking. The laboratories of the “Arsenal of Ideas” will organize different master classes, individual and group classes for children.

Art Kyiv Contemporary will be open until November 24, seven days a week from 11 a.m. till 8 p.m.