Eighty masterpieces

The Transcarpathian Regional Yosyp Bokshai Art Museum is hosting an unusual exposition – a solo exhibit of Volodymyr Mykyta, member of Ukraine’s Academy of Arts, National Taras Shevchenko Prize winner, People’s Painter of Ukraine, Honorary Freeman of Uzhhorod, to mark his 85th birthday.

The artist personally chose items for this exposition, mostly from his own and the museum’s collection, which he considers milestones in his oeuvre. Transcarpathia’s present-day fine arts luminary has presented about 80 canvases of diverse styles and genres that brought him a truly European fame.

FLOOD / Photo replica by the author

“His works represent the lineage of generations, parents and children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The artist conveys an acute feeling of generations’ continuity through the emotional lens of the native land and parental home. The author’s pictures have always revealed the naked and unvarnished truth of peasant work. This is accompanied by a solemn song in praise of morality, the beauty of the inner human world, faith in God, and spirituality of ordinary people. The artist managed to create the image of his own mother as the apotheosis of the general theme of his work – the theme of Fatherland,” art critic Liudmyla Biksei says.

Mykyta is also one of the leading portraitists of the Ukrainian mid-to-late-20th-century visual arts. Andrii Chebykin, President of Ukraine’s Academy of Arts, emphasizes that “the artist was lucky to come under a powerful artistic influence of geniuses, but even this would have been of no effect if it had not involved his own skill and outlook. Volodymyr Mykyta has not just absorbed the Transcarpathian school of painting but found his own voice in it,” while the Transcarpathian Art Institute Rector Ivan Nebesnyk points out that in the Soviet era, when Transcarpathian authenticity in figurative arts was almost reduced to nothing, Mykyta managed to immortalize the colorful images and pictures of ordinary people’s life.

The exhibit will remain open at the Yosyp Bokshai Art Museum until February 29.