The exhibit is titled “Modern Ceramics in the Interior.” The works that perform an esthetic function at the level of high art and, at the same time, are designed for domestic use are always very popular among audiences. The new proof of this is the exhibit which captivates you with all kinds of individual innovative searches and creative findings of ceramists who try to apply a figurative plastic decision to customary household-use items.
For example, the vase is not a traditional vessel for flowers here: by the author’s fantasy and will, it dreams of having wings to fly over daily routine. One of the exhibited items, quite aptly named “A Vase Wants to Have Wings,” belongs to the hands and soul of the Kyiv-based young talented ceramist Olesia Dvorak-Halik, the concept author and organizer of the exhibit as well as initiator of the popular national TseHlyna festivals of ceramics in 2014-16. Inspired by the success of these uncommon ceramic forums, Olesia turned her nonresidential studio into an art gallery with an altruistic goal to give it as exhibition area to all gifted ceramists and thus further develop this unsurpassed variety of “art on fire” in Ukraine.
Under her concept, every exhibited item reveals its foremost artistic idea, trying to “emancipate itself” from the commonplace function and assert its inner esthetic independence, self-sufficiency, self-valuation, and only then shows its household-use nature. For example, some figurative lamps turn into an eloquent sculptural dialog between a man and a woman (“Human Lamps” by V. Khyzhynsky, Lutsk); others become pyramids strewn with ancient alphabetic symbols (“Writings” by M. Halenko, Kyiv), are embodied as juicy Caucasian pomegranates (“Red Lamps” by T. Danielyan, Armenia) or as refined and delicate spheres of various diameters (a “three-figure composition” by S. Halenko, Kyiv). The exhibited pottery proves convincingly that, on the one hand, it will eternally remain a strong “branch” of the ever-blossoming “tree” of Ukraine’s applied arts (vases “Autumnal Lake,” “A Frosty Morning,” and “Sunset” by D. Bilokin, Poltava), and, on the other, pottery can also create images, as if it were a visual art (lamps “White and Blue” by D. Vovk, Kyiv). This can be also done in the shape of vessel installations made of thick-walled chamotte cups and square plates with curved wings and an expressive palette of dim, dull-luster, black, gray, and brown colors (“Tower” by the Lege Artis studio, Kyiv); or as refined vases and bottles seemingly made not from clay but from some antiquated laces drawn from your grandmother’s 19th-century chest (“White Laces” by Ye. Protsenko, Kyiv); or as various art objects – chests skillfully designed as a sea wave that carries a cheerful little toy boat (“On the Waves of Happiness” by V. Khyzhynsky, Lutsk); a ceramic pillow draped with the Ukrainian flag (“European Dreams” by J. Mironow, Poland); or the pots that resemble seashells, owing to their “intuitive” plastique of free forms, albeit with round eyelets (“Pots” by O. Savelieva, Kyiv).
The exhibit proves that in the early 21st century ceramics is becoming sort of a synthetic variety of oeuvre that combines the artistic expressiveness of sculpture (a dead wood vase “Murmun” by M. Kuzmenko, Kyiv), painting (plate “Pomegranates” by T. Danielyan), graphics (“Earth,” “Water,” “Sky” by M. Halenko), sculptural and painting plastique (“Twins” series by O. Dvorak-Halik), and stands in the vanguard of formative experiments among other varieties of decorative art. All the original works by 15 participants in this high-profile art project can freely exist both in the residential and public interior and in the exhibition and museum space, “adjusting,” above all, to the associative thinking, imagination, and spiritual world of the spectator. The ultimate conventionality and laconism of their plastique, associativity, and multiplicity of figurativeness, and a minimal number of the means of artistic expressiveness can produce a really strong esthetic effect in the interior.
According to the TseHlyna Art Gallery director Dvorak-Halik, almost at the last moment – when the exposition was being formed – ceramists were unexpectedly joined by masters of experimental textile art: Olha Radionova (Kyiv) with her uncommon, in terms of materials, series of soft sculptures “Comets and Planets” (gypsum, textile), and the Valina studio with a series of textile pillows made in the “Travels” application technique and a series based on folk ornaments. What is also considered an original gem of the exposition is a textile module composition, “Wall,” made by the well-known Kyiv graphic artist Kateryna Bruievych on a natural cloth by means of the author’s own printing technique based on that of ancient painted tiles.
The artworks of textile and ceramics masters always harmoniously combine in a residential interior and in the exhibition space, and this is undoubtedly a successful idea for one of the next projects of Kyiv’s TseHlyna Art Gallery, the number of whose aficionados is more and more increasing with every new artistic event.
