Quest for truth

Art life in Lviv is hard to imagine without Flinta. He was born in Ternopil oblast. In 1959, he graduated from the Department of Decorative Art at the Trush Lviv College of Applied Art. In 1959–65, he studied at the Department of Ceramics in the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, and then taught there, beginning in 1965.

In 1968, Flinta took an internship course in the art academies of Warsaw, Cracow, and Wroclaw. In 1971, he was appointed as head of the decorative and applied art section in Lviv’s branch of the Artists’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR. He took part in and later organized such well-known art exhibits as “Lviv Ceramics,” which outlined the new possibilities of this traditional art. Flinta’s works won him an honors diploma at an international ceramics biennale in Faenza (Italy, 1974). His colorful works were displayed at numerous art exhibits in Ukraine and abroad.

This excellent painter, graphic artist, and ceramist matured as a creative individual during Khrushchev’s period of “thaw” when artists were able to experiment with form and content. Flinta was fortunate enough to have such teachers as Roman Selsky and Karlo Zvirynsky who showed him the way to the 20th-century world of formal free thinking, particularly as represented by the Cracow and Paris art schools.

Flinta became one of the most active adepts of the Zvirynsky school and eagerly absorbed the European experience, adjusting to it his own creative approach and comparing it to classical European techniques, primarily those of Paul Ctzanne. Flinta preferred pastel and tempera, with refined brushstrokes. In ceramics he produced singular graphic effects. Regardless of material, his works were always marked by an innate unity of color and texture, an atmosphere of pure emotions, and the domination of peace and good.

Flinta died when only 53 years of age, at his creative peak. The ABC-Art Gallery’s exposition offers a glimpse of this Lviv artist’s creative inner world that seems to be ahead of his times, obliterating the boundary lines between artistic means and various materials.