Talent’s dialogue with the world
In February Yurii Herts could have celebrated his 82nd birthday. Therefore, an exhibition of his works in Kyiv is a commemoration of the great master and a unique opportunity to admire the paintings, which were exhibited for the first and the last time nearly 20 years ago.
Herts’ successful artistic career began in Transcarpathian town Khust. He lived there for 20 years. That was the place where he understood the true language of painting. Yurii Herts is an author of paintings, deeply folk in their nature. His paintings are preserved in the national art museums of Italy, Georgia, Hungary, Russia, Slovakia, Romania, Canada, the USA, and Germany as art works that best represent the Ukrainian beauty. Mostly these are paintings from the series “Colorful Ukraine.” In 1994 Hertz received Taras Shevchenko National Prize in the field of fine arts for this series.
People’s Artist of Ukraine Yurii Herts was recognized in the World’s Art Encyclopedia of All Times published by Institute for European Art History of the University of Heidelberg in 2011. He is often called the poet of Verkhovyna – artist’s homeland. His teachers were the legends of the school of painting: Yosyp Bokshai, Adalbert Erdeli, and Fedir Manailo. Learning from them, Herts persistently developed his talent and soon became a prominent representative of the second wave of the Transcarpathian school of painting. “If you think and analyze a lot and then something starts bothering your heart, take a pencil or brush in your hand,” Herts used to say often.
The world around Herts was always an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him: city, traditional holiday, village landscape… Art critic Viktoria KUDRIAVTSEVA says that “Herts’ painting is saturated with musical, major, and vitalistic notes. Perfect artistic sense of decorative spots, open colors and their contrast combinations, which makes paintings very expressive, and the emphasized ethnographic theme form the basis of artist’s creative style.”
Herts remained loyal to his chosen topic for many years and painted his large Carpathian rondo that included several main themes underlined by color arrangement (as in classical music, where some theme is repeated several times in a large rondo taking turns with transition-fragments). However, it is very sad that artist’s own artistic melody was unexpectedly cut short in September 2012.
Exhibition “Large Rondo by Yurii Herts” is open in the art gallery “ABC-art” from February 12 until March 2. Sundays and Mondays are days off. Admission is free.
