The Akvarel Gallery has opened the one-woman show of Vira Tomashevska, a famous Kyiv-based ceramic artist from Uzhhorod. Her works are canvases consisting of numerous intricate ceramic fragments: fairy-tale birds and fantastic fishes, fall leaves and spring flowers, vessels with colorful sails, and festive masks. But perhaps the most captivating are her ceramic houses, so numerous and invariably original, resembling either multicolored witch’s houses or old buildings in Uzhhorod, the artist’s native town. Vira Tomashevska uses these and many other ceramic fragments to create her own world. Her towns of clustered gingerbread houses are drowned in gardens, separated by rivers, and sometimes isolated on islands, surrounded by swimming fish. And when the town is lit by ceramic stars, huge tomcats leap from rooftop to rooftop. Where the towns end the primeval woods begin, with lost lambs wandering among the trees and snowdrops coming out from under fallen leaves. In Vira Tomashevska’s ceramic world there are obstacles neither to the revelries nor the huge birds that flit from canvas to canvas.
