Dialogue between naive and modern

The project Topical in Folk Style, now launched by the Ya Gallery art center and Rodovid Gallery, shows a dialogue between the naive (bucolic) and the contemporary Ukrainian art. Project managers Lidia Lykhach and Pavlo Hudimov focus on light which is an important element in folk landscape and is inevitably traced in the present-day post-landscape. This can be read in the exhibit announcement.

The naive/folk part comprises individual landscapes (Hanna Hotvianska, Oleksandra Shabatura, Yakiv Yushchenko, Panas Yarmolenko, et al.), landscapes by a group of 1920s—1930s Poltava-based craftsmen whose names we know thanks to years-long research by Kim Skalatsky, former director of the Poltava Art Museum, as well as stenciled works.

Now that painting has been pronounced “dead” so many times but never died, landscape shows in a new light in the works of contemporary authors. Each of the artists uses it as part of their own creative search: Yurii Pikul displays post-realistic urban landscape, Artem Volokitin and Andrii Sahaidovsky touch upon the theme of nature and present-day countryside, the works of Mykola Matsenko show social reflections against the backdrop of an industrial catastrophe, while Ihor Yanovych and Tiberius Szilvasi reduce landscape to utter abstraction.

The exhibit at the Ya Gallery art center (49b vul. Khoriva) will remain open until April 6, 2010.