The display is entitled “Following the sun.” It is retrospective, featuring more than 30 artworks made between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, owned by the artist’s family.
Works by Anatolii Lymariev (1929-85) are a rare commodity on the art market; whenever any of his work is auctioned, the selling price is several times more than the estimate. At the time, critics compared him to Van Gogh and called him a sun-worshiper.
There have been no personal exhibitions of Lymariev during his life, and afterwards there were only two, the last one having been in distant 1999. The name of Anatolii Lymariev is well known among artists and art critics though. The Master was respected, loved, and admired for his work. Nevertheless, the artist’s figure of a genius remains largely unknown in the context of Ukrainian art of the second half of the 20th century. His artistic style did not meet the requirements of Socialist-realist aesthetics, which is why his works were rarely exhibited. According to Anna Lymarieva, the artist’s daughter, who was one of the initiators of the current exhibition, “father did pay attention to how people perceive him, but that did not stop him from working. It is in his art he knew quite clearly what he wanted, and he followed his goals, self-improving endlessly.”
The artist’s friends remember that Anatolii considered all his paintings to be incomplete and occasionally returned to them in order to add something.
The exhibition is open through December 15.
