Without titles

Serhii Biba, the region’s noted representative of abstract art, is holding a retrospective exhibit to mark his own anniversary. The artist displays his selected works at Uzhhorod’s Yosyp Bokshai Transcarpathian Regional Art Museum.

The exposition comprises dozens of canvases the artist has painted in different periods since the 1990s. It is no accident that Biba’s works are exhibited without titles, for it is a characteristic feature of his oeuvre. The artist thus allows the spectator to understand on his or her own the essence of what is depicted on the canvas. In his works, the artist experiments with texture and color, and his canvases can shape a certain mood and stir up emotions.

Biba is also called modernist artist. As a true Transcarpathian (the artist was born in the village of Kushnytsia, Irshava raion), he could not help but continue the best traditions of the Transcarpathian school of painting. The artist himself thinks that he represents the regional painting school and is convinced that abstract art is rooted in this school’s traditions. Working in the genres of painting, graphics, and installation, he has introduced something qualitatively new and typical of him only into Transcarpathian painting.

According to art critic Halyna Ryzhova, “Serhii Biba has been in art throughout his lifetime. He boldly plays with vertical and horizontal planes in non-figurative art (an allusion to Wassily Kandinsky: vertical and horizontal are the masculine and the feminine principles, respectively). His canvases sometimes resemble bright Oriental arabesques or look like multicolored stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals.”

Biba studied at Zoltan Bakonii’s art school, is member of the National Union of Ukrainian Artists, and winner of the regional Bokshai and Erdeli Prize. The artist’s works have been displayed at numerous regional, national, and international exhibits, symposiums, plein-air shows, and are part of many museum and private collections in Ukraine, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Israel, Japan, and the US.

But the artist is not going to rest on his laurels. There will be new searches, forms, and themes, in which he will try, as always, to show his own essence and reflections, and to communicate with the spectator by means of the paintbrush and paints.