Laurels for revolutionaries
At the end of last week, the Kyiv PinchukArtCentre announced the names of PinchukArtCentre 2011 Prize laureates, which were chosen by the honorary members of international jury that specially came to Kyiv for this purpose.
Kyivite Mykyta Kadan became the winner of the main prize with the work Pedestal. The practice of displacing. He received 100,000 hryvnias and an opportunity to go for a training in a worldwide known artist’s studio. Besides, without prior selection Mykyta got onto the list of nominees for Future Generation Art Prize 2012 – an international award for young artists.
Special prize laureates were Zhanna Kadyrova (Kyiv) and Serhii Radkevych (Lutsk). Each of the winners will receive 25,000 hryvnias and a month-long training in the studio of one of the worldwide known artists.
Finally, the public prize of 10,000 hryvnias was given to Mykyta Shalenny, a resident of Dnipropetrovsk. Almost half of this year’s nominees took part in the first exhibition of Prize 2009, the rest of participants were newcomers. It is noticeable that young artists finally began to move away from the amorphous and long outdated practice of postmodernism. The form of a work may remain common or even se-condary, but there definitely is freshness, topical interest or radicality of gesture. The new tendency in contemporary art is social or even political, and this is what the jury encouraged.
Mykyta Kadan in his installation Pedestal. The Practice of Displacing has built a conditional pedestal from white plasterboard, which ends just in the ceiling without being completed by a monument; nearby on the walls, he placed a subtle – white on white – chronicle of disparagement and destruction of monuments all over Ukraine in the past few years, not specifying whether it was a leader of Bolshevism, an UNR or OUN figure, or a Russian empress.
Street-artist Serhii Radkevych was awarded for the fresco The Eucharist, which is located inside the historic building of Besarabsky market. This work looks quite traditional, it is performed in the spi-rit of somewhat modernized Orthodox church painting.
In her turn, Zhanna Kadyrova presented carved pieces of cracked asphalt roads that begin to look like abstract paintings in the space of the gallery, and an asphalt ball at the entrance to the art center.
One can argue about the originality and craftsmanship of these works, still it is promising that such different artists became the winners.
There is another interesting re-gularity – the R. E. P. group (Revolutionary Experimental Space), which declared about itself for the first time seven years ago during the Orange Revolution, has in fact received recognition; Kadan and Kadyrova are the group’s most active participants, and generally there were four R. E. P. members among the nominees. So the post-Orange generation has fully established in life, but only time will tell how good it is for our art in general.
