The Kyiv Marat Gelman Gallery hosts a one-man show by veteran of the installation genre in the Ukrainian visual arts, Lviv- based Andriy Sahaidakovsky.
Sahaidakovsky does not visit the capital very often, although he belongs to the top list of the local contemporary art, along with its founding fathers Oleksandr Roitburd, Arsen Savadov, Oleh Kulyk, and Vlod Kaufman. As early as in the late 1980s, he was one of the first in the Ukrainian arts to turn to the genre of installation, i.e., creating a work of art by setting up already existing things, often having nothing to do with art, into a conceptually single object. While in world art history it was German Joseph Beuys who introduced this genre; for Ukraine Sahaidakovsky can be called, to certain extent, his ideological successor.
Visual figurativeness, as well as material selection for the installations, drastically differ the Kleve-based German from the Lviv- based Ukrainian. In accordance with the Slavic mentality, Sahaidakovsky’s view is warmer, more emotional and soft. However, both maestros study the same territory, so-called reality.
The vague, unconvincing, and ephemeral character of what we usually call reality had been stated by thinkers belonging to completely different worldviews. St. Francis of Assisi saw the world with all its details and interconnections as an amazing miracle, existing by God’s will and able to instantly change beyond recognition. Such a view still bears a huge charge of hope and joy as well as the ability to see miracles in trivial details, which connect life events with invisible threads. Gustav Meyrink exhibited reality no less convincingly, believing that it is ruled by the most evil and dreary demons that cultivate the strongest passions and catastrophes. Georgy Giurdzhiyev demanded from his progeny that they completely break the casual perception of the internal and external reality through various intolerable physical, psychical, and intellectual exercises. According to his doctrine, so-called reality is a product of its automatic perception by the people who, by force of their stereotypes, have been transformed into mechanisms since their youth. One of the twentieth century’s best paradoxes belongs to Bertrand Russel: we cannot know what happens to a table when we turn our backs on it; perhaps it becomes a kangaroo. Whatever view on reality is inherent in Sahaidakovsky’s works’ spectator, the artist would unavoidably push him toward an unconscious question which, it seems, should nt exist for a philistine: What is reality and does it exist at all?
The Imitator of Reality project presents Andriy Sahaidakovsky in the multi-media manner so characteristic of him. The exhibition’s expositional and conceptual focus is the Soft Part of the Table installation, specially created by the artist inside the gallery with the use of materials both ordered in Kyiv and brought from Lviv. Andriy’s painting is also presented at the exhibition — his Features, Anatomy Studies, and Landscape Studies cycles created years ago, with their hyperbolized banality fraught with sacral symbols, grotesque in its figurativeness, pictorial manner, and materials (painting on carpets, for example). Sahaidakovsky makes illusion and reality change places, agitating the viewer’s foreseen reaction, disorienting him, and sowing doubts about the correctness of stereotypical world perception.
