Bohdan Mykhailovych Soroka, who was born in Lviv on September 2, 1940 and died in Rzeszow on April 9, 2015, was a Ukrainian graphic artist and the first head of the department of industrial graphics at the Lviv Academy of Arts. The artist had an extraordinary life. He was born and spent the first eight months of his life in prison, where his mother Kateryna Zarytska was held. The daughter of prominent mathematician Myron Zarytsky, she was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and served as a messenger at Roman Shukhevych’s headquarters. The artist’s father Mykhailo Soroka spent over 30 years in Soviet prison camps too, being a member of the Ukrainian resistance movement and the OUN as well as the organizer of the prisoners’ resistance organization called the OUN-North.
A worthy son of his parents, Soroka managed to keep his dignity intact and was a unique figure in the Ukrainian art, which his fellow artists attribute to his organic, inherent qualities obtained from his father and indirectly, through the father, from the latter’s generation of outstanding artists and intellectuals.
Soroka himself belonged to the Sixtiers’ generation of artists, which was under the KGB surveillance. For 10 years, the artist was barred from exhibiting his creations, but he still kept working. Soroka was able to keenly observe life around him, to notice and respond to many subtle but symbolic processes, which led to diversity in his thematic range, including Ukrainian mythology as well as parables of his own and philosophical constructs.
Professor Roman Yatsiv noted: “He saw the process of creative work and the artist’s professional and national responsibility as all-important.” His works make strong impact through their national character and ethnic flavor. Ukrainianness permeates the works belonging to a number of graphic cycles, such as “Ukrainian Mythology,” “Kupala Night Games,” “Gnomes on the March,” “Architecture of Lviv,” “The Passion of the Christ,” and “Symbols and Emblems.”
Soroka’s 15 linocuts, created in the 1970s and 1980s, are kept in the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion. They belong to the cycles “Ukrainian Mythology” and “Architecture of Lviv.” The museum’s Religions of the Ancient World department has seven works on display. This mini-exhibition presents the artist’s visions of Slavic gods – Veles, Svaroh, Dazhdboh, Biloboh and Chornoboh, Stryboh – as well as other works: A Lviv Lane, The Zhovkva Synagogue and By a Synagogue.
The Bohdan Soroka Memorial Exhibition presents just a page from the artist’s voluminous legacy, a small detail portraying this renowned creator with rich soul and abundant imagination.
Olena Maliuha and Iryna Tsebenko are research fellows of the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion
