“Wood Nymph, or Ukraine Has Not Yet Died” is the name of an exhibit at Kyiv’s art gallery Tsekh. Its drawing card is a paradoxical combination of traditional and contemporary styles, even the avant-garde.
In fact, tradition was represented by the master landscapist Oleksa Zakharchuk. The artist’s biography reads like a novel. Born in 1929, in Illintsi, a town in Vinnytsia oblast, he was 15 when he joined the Soviet partisans and lost his parents in WWII. He was placed in an orphanage in Kharkiv, where he later studied in an art college. Later, one of his professors at Kyiv Art Institute was Tetiana Yablonska. He knew Viacheslav Chornovil well in his youth and signed a letter in support of the well-known dissident in 1968, after Chornovil’s first arrest. After that he was persecuted by Soviet authorities.
Zakharchuk says he has no “toys,” his term for government awards, although in 2002 he won the Kyiv Art Prize in the landscape nomination. His main awards are solo exhibits at the National Art Museum of Ukraine and in London. His works are on display in museums in Kyiv, Moscow, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Kramatorsk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Krasnohrad, Kharkiv, Kherson, Lutsk, Luhansk, Feodosia, Pavlodar, Chernihiv, Yampil, Yahotyn, Horlivka, Uman, Mariupol, and Simferopol. They are included in the collection of Ost-West Handelsbank and in private collections in Ukraine, Germany, the US, Russia, UK, Italy, Israel, Argentina, Australia, and Hungary.
Zakharchuk’s two works at the Tsekh Gallery reflect his penetrating view of an ordinary Central Ukrainian landscape. He applies no techniques to produce striking effects. His palette is restrained and his composition is balanced in the impressionist style. His images are markedly neutral and transparent, and yet they have the potential for any kind of generalization, both emotional and intellectual. In this simple and yet refined environment, there is room for enchanted depicted of nature and the pastoral images of rivers, small village huts, and hills —reflections on Ukraine which “has not yet died.” Such a landscape can be filled with any kinds of characters, and this is precisely what another artist, the Irish Michael Murphenko, tries to do. However, Zakharchuk’s landscapes are self-sufficient, serving as both the setting and the main character.
Murphenko’s works betray the influences of symbolists, Irish and Scottish pagan mythology, and the metaphysical explorations of the great poet and painter William Blake.
There was also another, musical, aspect to the exhibit in Tsekh, which dovetailed with the character of the works on display. The art critic Olena Ivanova-Solodovnykova once noted: “Like a musician, Zakharchuk improvises to create images of nature, molding together such notions as concreteness and generality. His brushstrokes are like music notes that form the intonation of colors, lighting, producing an integral melody and mood of a certain work.”
The music was performed by its author, Kyiv composer Alla Zahaikevych, who had specially written an opus in which electronic abstractions are intertwined with genuine folk songs, soft and nearly lyrical moods, and harsh noise. This music conveyed the spirit of the exhibit in which tradition stood next to innovation in the common artistic field.
