Investing in art

Exhibiton Contemporary Art, which will present nearly 130 painitings by contemporary artists from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia is launching on December 9 in the art-gallery “Art-Donbas,” Donetsk. The exhibition features works by many key Ukrainian painters of the past 20 years, some of which are well-known to the residents of Donetsk oblast. In addition to such acclaimed painters as the most expensive and powerful, according to the magazine Korrespondent, Ukrainian artist Anatolii Kryvolap and Illia Chichkan, known better in Europe, who presented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2009, there will also be presented works by well-known to Donetsk residents Pavlo Makov and Ihor Husev, participant of “ArtPoint-2011.”

The exposition will feature works by some artists, who are directly related to the Donbas region and Donetsk. The artist Oleksandra Makarska, who will present her painting Separation, was born in Donetsk.

Besides, the exhibition will feature “the patriarchs of Ukrainian transavantgarde”: Oleksandr Roitburd (painting from the series “Roitburd VS Caravaggio”), Vasyl Riabchenko (painting The Flood), Arsen Savadov (photo from the series “Angels”), and Vasyl Tsaholov (Blackmail from the series “Sex, Money, and Barrels”). Among Russian artists we should note famous Moscow artists Alexandr Savko and Larisa Zvezdochetova. Beside the masters of contemporary art, there will also be presented works by young artists, who were able to express themselves in areas such as photo, collage, street art, and digital art. Among these young artists there are the nominees for the award PinchukArtCenter-2011 Masha Shubina and Stepan Riabchenko.

Contemporary Art is a pre-auction exhibition. It was organized by the first and only auction house in Ukraine “Golden Section,” which specializes in contemporary art: painting, avant-garde, and design. The auction will be held on December 17 and anyone will be able to invest in contemporary art. The money, however, will have to be big – the collection was estimated by the experts at 600,000 to 800,000 dollars. Before the auction everyone can come and see the works by artists absolutely free of charge.

This will be the second major exhibition of contemporary art held in capital of Donbas in the last two months. We should remind our readers that ArtPoint exhibition, a gift to the city from System Capital Management on its 11th anniversary, still open until December 12. The exposition presented by Golden Section is different from ArtPoint in its scale. This is the first exhibition in Donetsk, which brought together the largest number of works by famlous artists of modern CIS. Of course, for mega cities such events must be not rare but natural. However, exhibition in the contemporary art format do not take place in Donetsk as often as desired. Oksana Zabuzhko, during her visit to Donetsk, defined this as “unpresentable spot on the cultural map of Ukraine because of the small number of events and due to the lack of cultural infrastructure.” Artist Andrii Lohinov at the ArtPoint-2011 opening ceremony also drew attention to the absence of mass cultural events in the megacity. He said that in comparison with Berlin, Donetsk is estimated not by the number of cultural events a day, but by the number of cultural events per week, per month. However, one could be pleased with the dynamics, with which the contemporary art began to develop in the capital of Donbas. We want to believe that it will become a good tendency for development of all kinds of art in this region, especially, because all conditions for this are present already.