Painting in Excess

Kyiv’s Art Revival, 1985-1993

ED I TED BY OLENA MARTYNYUK

The upheavals of glasnost and perestroika followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union remarkably transformed the art scene in Kyiv, launching Ukrainian contemporary art as a global phenomenon. The previously calm waters of the culturally provincial capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic became radically stirred with new and daring art made publicly visible for the rst time since the avant-garde period of the early twentieth century. As artists were freed from the dictates of the fading Communist ideology and the constraints of late socialist realism, an explosion of styles emerged, creating an effect of baroque excess. This exhibition catalogue traces and documents the diverse artistic manifestations of these transitional and exhilarating years in Kyiv while providing some historical artworks for context.

Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum

144 pp 85 color illustrations 9.25 x 11 978-1-9788-3075-2 cloth $49.95AT

December 2021

Art

Table of Contents

Foreword Donna Gustafson

Acknowledgments Olena Martynyuk

Introduction Julia Tulovsky

1 Painting Ukrainian Perestroika: A Parade of Excesses Olena Martynyuk

2 The Point of No Return: The Art of Kyiv at a Historical Crossroads Oleksandr Soloviov

3 Back and Down to Empty Landscapes: Notes on Ukraine’s Reverse Modernism Asia Bazdyrieva

4 Prodigal Children of Socialist Realism: New Ukrainian Art and the Soviet Art School Alisa Lozhkina

5 Collecting Eras: A Conversation Igor Abramovych & Olena Martynyuk

Artists’ Statements

Plates

Selected Bibliography

Checklist of the Exhibition

Index

Contributors

Bottom left: arsen savadov

Untitled (Horse), 1987

Oil on canvas

791⁄4 × 120 × 7⁄8

Top right:

12 Alla Horska (1929–1970)

Untitled (Silence), 1964

Gouache and graphite on paper

203⁄8 × 65⁄8 in.

Top left:

62 Florian Yuriev (b. 1929–2021)

Modus: Cross of Malevich, 1967 Tempera on cardboard the official art system as in the cases of Yuri Lutskevych outside Soviet art institutions altogether as Valery Lamakh Artists like Lutskevych, Ryzhykh, and Halyna Neledva can term of “permitted” (razreshennoe) art, suggested by Levashov and Ekaterina Degot to describe artists suspended official art institutions and their investment in unofficial short-term shows and deprived of monumental state commissions within institutions, these artists anticipated many features for the generations of the 1980s. Intellectual, expressive, and theatricality, their art was sometimes dreamlike and in mythology and historical styles, including the Ukrainian the boisterous freedom of perestroika art.

Still, the continuity between generations was this time. After Cleopatra’s Sorrow by Savadov and Senchenko scandal, Savadov brought a reproduction of it to Zaretsky, who had endorsed many of his earlier experiments did perhaps for the first time, the rupture between generations happen due to some violent historical event like war or change of scenery and vertigo brought about by the geopolitical Inconceivable yet inevitable,18 the shattering perceived by many as the perfect “end of history” event.

Cleopatra is apocalyptically hedonistic, while the painting cat. 29), made by Savadov shortly afterward, follows suit scattered and forlorn ruins. To diminish the eschatological the artists outlined many objects with a garish red contour, viewers that they are only looking at a picture, an artifice. to present the same cartoonish noir universe, Untitled oversized decorative architectural fragments, there is animated and snorting fumes out of its angry nostrils.