An exposition is being held at the National Andrei Sheptytsky Museum to mark the 70th birthday of Mykola Opanashchuk, a professor at the Lviv Academy of Arts, a well-known artist, designer, and pedagogue.
The hero of the day has staged about 220 expositions of different levels, including 50 solo exhibits. He is a member of the International Exlibris Center in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. He has over 150 original graphic symbols under his belt. Opanashchuk’s achievements in the field of painting and graphics have been repeatedly marked with awards both in and outside Ukraine. He has been teaching at the alma mater since 1971. In 2010-15 he chaired the Drawing Department. The artist is the author of a series of publications on the pressing problems of art teaching.
“The exhibit of Mykola Opanashchuk’s prints at the National Museum reveals only one of the author’s artistic sides, while he also works successfully in the applied and computerized graphics, drawing (including caricature), painting, teaching, especially in the field of the theory and methodology of teaching specialized academic disciplines,” Lviv National Academy of Arts Pro-Rector Roman Yatsiv says. “But it is in the engraving that Opanashchuk’s artistic search and experiments have resulted in particular, systemic, and formally figurative discoveries. First of all, his art forte is composition – clearly designed, well-considered in all the details of plastic language, rhythmic organization of space, and linear-space interpretation of form. The artist has passed various stages of assessing the heritage of international and Ukrainian modernism, learning the fundamental principles of the syntax and morphology of image-making at these ‘lessons.’ Discipline in conceptual thinking gave him inner freedom to tackle the most complicated artistic issues. Developing his own artistic world-view, Opanashchuk was more and more penetrating into the metaphysical substances of life, turning to various subjects of history and the present day. Accordingly, the interpretation of every graphic genre – portrait, philosophical and symbolic composition, figurative lyrical scenes, architectural and ‘pure’ landscapes – always showed the element of a formally figurative discovery. For this reason, his oeuvre is a real feast, a triumph of sensitivity in a high – elitist, synthetic plastic – form.”
You can feast your eyes on Mykola Opanashchuk’s graphics at the National Andrei Sheptytsky Museum until June 20.
