The paradoxes of style

The exposition is being held at Lviv’s National Andrei Sheptytsky Museum. In the view of People’s Painter Liubomyr Medvid, the exhibit’s curator, Oleh Minko (1938-2013) was one of symbolic Ukrainian painters of the mid- and late 20th century and an intellectual artist.

Oleh Minko was born in Makiivka. In 1959 he entered the artistic weaving division of the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (now Lviv Academy of Arts). His mentors were Roman Selsky, Karlo Zvirynsky, and Danylo Dovboshynsky. Minko was a brilliant representative of the Lviv art school. From 1982 until his death, he taught at his alma mater. He was a professor, head of the artistic textile department, a People’s Painter of Ukraine. In 2002 the Academy of Arts opened Professor Minko’s Class. In 2009 the artist celebrated the 50th anniversary of his artistic career.

Three weeks before Minko departed this life, an exhibit was opened at the Academy of Arts in honor of his 75th birthday. His colleagues remember that the master was deeply moved by this care and was in a very good mood.

“He was an esthete, but his esthetics was paradoxical,” Liubomyr MEDVID says. “I can say that Minko was a master of paradoxical esthetics, a personality that perceived the reflections of his time and the paradoxical signs of the global human Babylon through the prism of an exquisite esthetic mood. This mood of his has nothing to do with an esthetic pose, mannerism, or a philosophical mask – it is an innate thing which he intuitively regarded as an obvious and natural reaction to ugliness and beauty, evil and good, the majestic and the base. In Minko’s lens of senses, the fissured, scarred, and cut-up world of pristine integrity and celestial perfection always remains dramatic and full of special salubrious harmony. The vulnerability of this world is resurrectional, live, and captivating. Beauty, which is supposed to save the world, is quite in place and necessary, while harmony positions itself as the only truth under the skies.

“You, a spectator, are bound to feel the breath of a gorgeous harmonious essence of consubstantial, undivided, and majestic existence behind the shaky form – particularly on Minko’s late canvases, – behind the nervous palisade of lines that look like scratches, behind the dramatically bright color blotches and a broken painting pattern. It is from this bright perspective that the paradoxes of Minko’s style are evident. What Minko depicts as sad will seem cheerful to you, you will see as calm and stoic what he presents as cruel and tragic, and you will find order and well-balanced bliss in a pileup of forms.”