The world of Liubov Panchenko
Kyiv hosts an exhibition of watercolors and decorative paintings by a 1960s-generation artist
The Mykhailo Hrushevsky Historical and Memorial Museum and the Sixtiers Movement Museum offer a meeting with a female artist who ranks with such geniuses as Maria Prymachenko and Hanna Sobachko. This kind of exhibit is a pearl in the crown, a rare chance to see the oeuvre of a strong personality who devoted all her lifetime to the love of folk art.
The exposition “My World” comprises two halls of watercolors and decorative paintings by the talented Ukrainian artist Liubov Panchenko, Vasyl Stus Prize winner and member of the Union of Ukrainian Women. The artist belongs to the generation of the 1960s dissidents (“Sixtiers”) who pursued the interests of ethnic art and culture in the Soviet period of stagnation. Among her friends and colleagues are Liudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Alla Horska, Viktor Zaretsky, Nadia Svitlychna, and Mykola Plakhotniuk. Unfortunately, Ms. Panchenko, who has already marked her 70th birthday with a solo exhibition, rarely visits Kyiv, and her artworks do not often appear at Kyiv’s crowded picture shows. For this reason, the current exposition is unique and bound to draw the attention of the spectators who can be good judges of ethnic traditional art.
“My World” is really a world in itself. It is a particular space which is open not to those who cast a superficial and cursory glance, but to those who really love Ukrainian songs and proverbs, brightly embroidered shirts, and traditional paintings.
The two small halls of the Hrushevsky mansion shine with the inner light of decorative gouaches that show a magical firebird, gorgeous flowers, a merry piglet, and a funny cat patterned as a rhythmic ornament. The naive and pure world of oral folklore and traditional painting exposes the artist’s close inner ties with original Ukrainian motifs. Even the realistically-painted Carpathian landscapes continue to sing the tune of her soul: the fabulous images of mountains and uprooted trees are ready to tell their story to anybody who knows how to listen to the quiet voice of nature.
Liubov Panchenko was born in 1938 in the village of Yablunka near Kyiv. After leaving the embroidery department of an applied arts school, she worked as a dressmaker. Liubov’s peers say she was brimming with very bold and bright ideas even when she was still a young girl: she mastered the linocut technique, enthusiastically painted watercolors, and did a lot of embroidering. After doing part-time studies at the Graphics Faculty of the Ukrainian Ivan Fedorov Printing Institute, she worked as a clothes designer in a technological project institute and the Ukrainian Fashion House.
The main direction of Panchenko’s artistic line is hot and sincere admiration of folk art in combination with loyalty to her choice. Even despite bans “from above,” she never “reeducated herself,” i.e. she not only stayed on in her field work, but also sank deeper into it. In the stormy 1960s, Liubov was a regular and enthusiastic visitor to the Suchasnyk club of creative youth and was a member of Brama, its literary section.
She deliberately worked in all her spare time, embroidering even on the suburban train whenever she commuted from Kyiv to her country house in Bucha Lisna. Ukrainian intellectuals were proudly wearing the shirts she embroidered. A mistress with “hands of gold,” Liubov could make a masterpiece out of even the plainest remnants of a material – for example, she made more than 40 unique collages from a piece of unpretentious coat cloth.
Today, the mistress’s artworks can only be seen in the private collections of her friends and colleagues as well as in the repositories of the Sixtiers Movement Museum. Speaking of Liubov Panchenko’s solo exhibit to mark her 70th birthday, the well-known Sixtier writer Yevhen Sverstiuk very wittily characterized the essence of her art work: “She lives in a world of her own, and she opens this world to us.” This modest and gifted lady not only did not bend under the burden of various misfortunes of life, but did preserve her pure and fantastically radiant world for us. Even the names of the series of her decorative paintings are deeply poetic: the spectator can guess that it is not just about Ukraine, but about one more territory – the Country of Happiness and Dream.
The exhibit will remain open at the Hrushevsky Museum until July 16.
Olena Shapiro is an art historian
