Exposition at the Irena Gallery

A new exposition at the Irena Gallery is composed of works by two young artists from Kyiv, Yuliya Firsova (prints) and Hanna Voloshko (sculpture).

At first sight, an attempt to combine such different works (and different worldviews) was a risk if not a rash decision. Yet the exposition is there, and the two young female artists coexist peacefully, while chamber plastique and monumental graphics are bound ever tighter by invisible strings of sense and association.

Yuliya Firsova’s works are collected under the general heading, Ecliptic of the Zodiac. Elegant miniature prints presented as Signs of the Zodiac open the exposition and seem not so much a full-fledged component of the series as an epigraph and a key to understanding it. Ecliptic of the Zodiac appears to be a revival of Herculean efforts in terms of high-precision and sophisticated illustrations for astronomical works of the baroque epoch, in which the patterns of planetary movement naturally coexisted with allegorical figures blowing horns and wearing billowing clothes. Yuliya Firsova resolutely intruded in the heroic epoch when the most effective celestial sights were marked not by dull mathematical calculations but using grandiloquent expressions (Unity, Toward Gemini) and were perceived simultaneously as natural phenomena and mysterious signs and tokens. Her prints are extremely complicated in terms of composition and color arrangement. Intertwining, emerging, and disappearing figures and signs sparkle solemnly with purple and golden hues.

Hanna Voloshko is a master of parable in all its manifestations (of which there appear to be legion). Perhaps this is why she prefers small forms (but by no means small plastique), sculptural aphorisms of sorts where every detail requires the utmost polishing. At times the artist balances on the verge of a daily life anecdote (Wonder Boy), other times she tends toward fable (Temptation). In the former case one is suddenly faced with a playful understatement, and allegory is as inherent in her creativeness (Transfiguration), conventionality, and philosophic saturation, which do not interfere with her almost naturalistic details. Such limitations and at the same time paradoxes in elaborating practically every subject matter are combined in Voloshko’s works with a natural and simultaneously paradoxical approach to the material. The artist is keenly aware of bronze, her favorite material, while obtaining from it most unexpected qualities, achieving the desired effect.