Zbirka (2021 – 2023)
We created and promoted products inspired by the phenomena of Ukrainian culture
Pillars
Olexander Bohomazov
"To create a rhythmic value" - this is how art critic Dmytro Horbachev formulated Bohomazov's meta-task in most of his paintings. Clear rhythm: up-down, up-down, blue-yellow, white-pink, length-width-height. The most delicate veil is a cloud of shavings, which flies chaotically downwards. If we hear the sound in the "Fixing saws", in the "Pillars" you can smell freshly sawn wood. Such a virtual reality with all the senses involved. This is pure meditation, as in the dances of Turkish dervishes.
However, this flow of consciousness has a clear theoretical basis. For Bohomazov, it all starts from a point on the canvas. It is continued by line and movement - together they create the phenomenon of form. Bohomazov's attempt to organize the surrounding chaos was systemic and lyrical at the same time. Not so often the artist combines two identities: the analyst and the resonator. Bohomazov succeeded.
Fixing saws
O. Bohomazov
When you look at "Fixing saws", you first hear the sound. Anyone who has ever held a flexible and resilient sheet of metal in their hands will always remember its voice. Sound engineers use it to simulate distant thunder. The color also thunders here - clean, bright, not cloudy. And people are all so "new", perfect. Moustached folk characters become cosmites on another planet. Planet of idealized labor. Apparently, the artist painted it in the moment of his happiest and most optimistic outlook on life.
We knew nothing about Bohomazov until, in the mid-1960s, a young art critic, Dmytro Horbachev, discovered this talented artist. His paintings, miraculously preserved by widows, began to travel to world exhibitions. Bohomazov finally pulsed in a rhythm that so seduced him for life.
Carousel
Davyd Burlyuk
Another option for developing the idea of a red horse. From the romantic pathos of Petrov-Vodkin, through the applied everyday life of Palmov, Burliuk comes to a toy, fixed on the carousel of a children's grasshopper. And everything big and uncircumcised suddenly becomes childish, unreal, like an imitation. Here and there spirals appear - the main symbol of the revolution, reflected in the Tower of Tatlin, and revolutionary changes in art. For the first time, Burliuk has an alter ego of a red horse - a black horse with whimsical nostrils and transparent eyes. And this anxious horse is not a carousel at all - it is threateningly free and unpredictable. Does a man see him, defenseless, naked and with a halo of naivety? Is she still fascinated by running around a wooden imitation circle?
Davyd Burliuk is one of the artists from whom "contemporary art" begins, namely Ukrainian and Soviet futurism. Outrageous, with a painted face, a glass eye, a drop earring and binoculars, Burliuk united talented rascals around him and "stirred" the rock of traditional ideas about art. The artist emigrated to Japan and then moved to the United States. By will, his ashes were scattered over the Atlantic.
Two women
Bilkina
Extrahistorical, contextless, sensual improvisation on a very intimate, private theme. Continuous quote: from Gauguin - the weight of the figures, the southern color, motley fabrics, from Picasso - constructivism in a position that is easy to disassemble in detail, from Matisse - a hint at the technique of decoupage. Decorative conversation with gestures and color. And as if nothing unusual. The question arises: where could this artist see the originals she quoted in her replica? And how did she dare to portray two naked female figures in the 1930s? One was a banal artistic practice, but two…
Bridge Sevres
Olexandra Exter
The Bridge of Sevres was one of 32 exhibits in the iconic Paris exhibition of the Section d’Or. This work is an illustration of the objection "I can do it, but I don't want it that way." In Paris, Oleksandra Exter from Kyiv never accepted the idea of monochrome or a limited color palette. The source of her vitality were the colors of folk art, multiplied by avant-garde forms. She taught Picasso himself to use bright colors.
Exter brought the aesthetics of cubofuturism to Kyiv from Europe. She founded the "Workshop of Painting and Decorative Arts", which wrapped all the threads of artistic life around her and gave birth to the Ukrainian avant-garde. Anatol Petritsky, Vadym Meller, Isaac Rabinovych, Mykhailo Epstein, Issahar Rybak and many others studied here. The artist also reformed the Ukrainian scenography. She created the profession of "light director", giving light and rays a separate, dominant visual role in the play, and since then the world theater has played all three dimensions of the stage, not just one plane.
Extinguished locomotives, standing factories are waiting for the coal of Donbass
Vasil Yermilov
One of the art critics said that there were "hungry rhythms" in this poster. Expectations and insufficiency. Everything seems to be standing, but waiting tensely and rhythmically. In the euphoria of industrialization, coal was like blood, without which everything dies. The inscription on the picture is a separate plot twist. It is an integral visual object together with the correction of the Ukrainian spelling of Donbass into Russian. Was there an ideological burden? Is it a fixation of instantaneous changes in the author's language priorities? Looking from a distance, such linguistic illustrations of the era have considerable symbolism.
Ermilov found the most laconic plastic counterpart of the 1920s and 1930s. Two or three colors, several geometric shapes and, of course, the font, as the most characteristic technique of the Kharkiv art school that remained until now. Museums did not buy Ermilov's works. This poster was the first work bought by the Kyiv Museum in 1966. The then Ministry of Culture offered 20 rubles for it.
Tomato Picking
Ivan Padalka
The icon-painting, neo-Byzantine "Tomato Picking" is easy to imagine somewhere in the side nave of the church. The usual work scene is sacralized to the image of collecting gifts in the Garden of Eden. Apparently this is what paradise looked like in the imagination of Ukrainian peasants. The artist has already seen this paradise somewhere - the picture was painted in 1932, in Kharkiv. A year before the creation of the artificial Great Famine, when bodies began to be collected on the streets of the city.
Padalka himself was one of Boychuk's brilliant students. Everything was epic in this artist: tall, golden hair, Cossack surname, the name of his native village - Zhornoklyovy, a flower dream of grass, which he wore behind his ear and in sandals. And, of course, the epic rebellious nature.
Mowing
Olexander Petrenko
The complete opposite of the anxiety of the "Modern Landscape", in which you seem to hear the sound of an airplane. Picture of absolute silence. Still fog, trees, sky. Even the mowers have already done everything and seem to have frozen. Everything is motionless, except the rhythm of forms and perspectives. Perfect rustic landscape. The colors are fresh and warm, moist. All shapes are round, soft, human-friendly. The sky does not dominate or dramatize. All the main things happen on earth, where there are no artificial structures. There is only a perfect egg shape in the mounds.
Portrait of the futurist poet Mykhailo Semenko
Anatol Petritsky
The artist Anatol Petrytsky and the futurist poet Mykhailo Semenko were friends and together provoked the artistic life in the then capital - Kharkiv. In the portrait, the artist looks at his character through a cafe window. He seemed to catch a glimpse of a moment in the life of the writer and go on, preserving this memory.
During the 1927-1930s, Petritsky painted a series (about 150) of portraits of Ukrainian artists: writers Yuri Yanovsky, Maxim Rylsky, Mykola Khvylovy, artists of the Les Kurbas Theater "Berezol", as well as artists, including Ivan Padalka. Petritsky knew everyone personally. Together with many heroes of the paintings, Petritsky lived in the Slovo House in Kharkiv. It was a large and diverse environment of writers and artists, essentially the color of the revival of Ukrainian culture in one house. Residents of forty apartments out of sixty-six were repressed. Most of the portraits of Petritsky's hand were destroyed. Semenko was shot for "attempting to organize a terrorist act against Kosior, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine".
