Donation ceremony was held on the birthday of the artist (Ostafiichuk turned 75 last week). Numerous guests, who honored the master’s anniversary, examined the retrospective exhibition of his graphic artwork and paintings, as well as the pages of an album-monograph by Marian Besaha – Ivan Ostafiichuk. Sources of creativity. The celebration had been visited by the artist’s friends, colleagues, art historians, the Academy of Arts students, and other people interested in Ostafiichuk’s talent; all of them said that the master’s characters and themes are familiar to every person since their childhood, and that the world of his artistic images is distinct and peculiar; also, of course, everyone wished the master good health and aptitude for art for many years to come.
Ivan Ostafiichuk was born on July 28, 1940 in Trostianets village near Ivano-Frankivsk. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vyzhnytsia, then – in the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (nowadays Lviv National Academy of Arts). Among his teachers were Yaroslava Muzyka, Roman Selsky, and Leopold Levytsky. After graduation he worked in the field of decorative arts, creating tapestries, monumental and decorative panels and mosaics. Already as a student he became an exhibitor at regional, republican, soviet, and international exhibitions. Since 1978 he has been organizing personal exhibitions. In 1980, at the 9th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Brno (Czechoslovakia), where several thousand works of more than 600 artists had been on display, he received the Gold Medal for the “Ukrainian folk songs” series of monotypes.
Ostafiichuk’s works were exhibited at the International Quadrennial of Small Prints, the third Biennale of European Printmaking, the exhibitions of Soviet graphics in Belgium and France. In 2007 he became the winner of the National Taras Shevchenko Prize for a series of artworks: “My Ukraine,” “Journey to Baturyn,” and “Saga of the Boykos.”
The retrospective exhibition of Ivan Ostafiichuk’s graphic works and paintings is open through August 16.
