ART KYIV Contemporary, or just “Art-Kyiv” has been held for the 7th time, and this time organizers assure that the format of the event has been changed; now it is a forum, not a fair. Mystetsky Arsenal displays exhibits from 20 galleries from six countries: Ukraine, Austria, Russia, Italy, Germany, and France, while the galleries were asked to prepare not just collections of works, but projects.
All project participants are well-known and have had numerous exhibits in the Arsenal before. Among them are Vasyl Tsaholov, Arsen Savadov, Oleksandr Roitburd, Maksym Mamsikov, Ihor Husiev, Viktor Sydorenko, Vlada Ralko, Andrii Sahaidakovsky, Artem Volokitin, Yurii Pikul, Hamlet, Anatolii Hankevych, Pavlo Kerestei, Eduard Kolodii, Mykyta Kravtsov, Zoia Orlova, Serhii Popov, Illia Prunenko, Dmytro Sydorenko, Masha Shubina, and Lesia Khomenko.
There are two foreign exhibits: “X. Ten” (an exhibition of 80 works by the trendy Moscow duo of Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubosarsky) and “Victor Vasarely’s artistic heritage and myth.”
Victor Vasarely is a French painter of Hungarian origin, who is considered to be one of the founders of pop art. His works also influenced design and architecture. The exhibit’s curator Tibor Chepei was Vasarely’s friend and has gathered a huge collection of his works: the Arsenal presents 120 serigraphies (a special kind of silkscreen printing, which involves application of a number of layers of paint), 20 objects (compositions made of glass or ceramic), as well as the artist’s manifestos and theoretical schemes.
Among the total grayness of the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s, Vasarely was a true revelation. His work, based on convex optical effects, which almost hurt your eyes, seemed a window onto a better world. Currently, these paintings, which occupy several halls in the Arsenal, are rather a fact of art history, legacy of the epoch. Today, these compositions, full of contrasting colors, play with perspective and line, and geometrically adjusted shapes seem to be closer to the realm of design. It becomes clear that instead of developing a new language of painting, Vasarely tried to create a comfortable environment that would outlive its author, and after all, he succeeded.
In general, it seems that the 7th “Art-Kyiv” has become, perhaps even unintentionally, an overview of such styles, understandable to the mass audience, like pop art and post-modernism. This primarily applies to the “Innovative Ukrainian figurativism,” which, in fact, consists of works by mostly domestic postmodernists who became famous in the late 1980s and have not changed substantially since then. Younger authors keep to approximately same style. The main features are the same for everyone: quotations, irony, which has lost most of its lightness over the past decade, playing with mass media and film images.
Vinogradov and Dubosarsky (exhibit “X. Ten” is composed of four of their cycles “Danger! Museum” (2009), “On the Block” (2010), “For Valor” (2011), and “Retrospective” (2012)), who also belong to the postmodern matrix, have two important differences: they are able to present themselves in a spectacular fashion and always feel the spirit of time. When various heroes and supermen were popular, they drew Yeltsin and Schwarzenegger; when social themes became trendy, they released “On the Block,” a series of paintings of life in an ordinary Moscow suburb; when Putin’s regime began to inflate the cult of victory in World War II, they made an extremely long painting “For Valor,” a group portrait of veterans. Their canvas format, which rarely is smaller than life-size, is also important.
They know how to please, because they work with clearly recognizable images and themes, and appeal to reliable reflexes and reflections of the public: any viewer will look at least for a second longer at the painting of a long-legged beauty, especially if she is dressed in a police uniform. Of course, one can speculate about their art as an ironic view on modern Russian reality, as friendly art critics do, but let us be honest: first of all, these two are talented opportunists who will always be in the spotlight. And this is the important point that should not be underestimated: it is the success of “On the Block” that helps diagnose the society.
The members of the “Italian Platform” are trying to attract the audience with similarly large, bright compositions, installations, and sculptures. But in my opinion, the most interesting works are presented in the Ukrainian part of the gallery. It clearly shows the stylistic and genre diversity of our art. The new series of works by one of the best Ukrainian painters Matvii Vaisberg (Triptych Gallery) is remarkable, its powerful color plastic is simply fascinating. Melancholic graphics by the Kharkiv artist Hamlet (Zynkivsky) is spectacular in its own way. The renowned Kyiv-based abstractionists Petro Bevza and Oleksandr Lytvynenko surprise the audience with their metal installation “The Non-existent Grass.” Similar finds can be spotted in other projects too.
But the most part of the exhibit is just chic, glam, and beauty. Present-day art is called so because it reflects the state of society. And the current state is that, despite all the political torments, the bourgeois spirit is steadily growing stronger, which results in increasing demand for culture. Is this good or bad? It depends on the perspective.
The 7th ART KYIV Contemporary forum is open at Mystetsky Arsenal till November 18.
For its part, the Arsenal also presented several special projects. Section “Painting only. Innovative Ukrainian figurativism” is permanently curated by Oleksandr Soloviov and contains our current painters’ works in the field of figurative art.
