The exhibition opened at the Palace of Arts on January 16. For the display, its author, veteran of the anti-terrorist operation Serhii Pushchenko provided more than a hundred images of volunteer fighters, which he created from May 2015 to April 2017, when he served with an independent battalion of the Right Sector’s Volunteer Ukrainian Corps (by the way of a reminder, The Day covered his exhibition in Kyiv in our No. 64 on October 26, 2017). The artist says that he has many brothers-in-arms, and has a story to tell about each of them.
“These portraits are unusual in that they were not made in a studio, but at the frontlines, and represent the so-called genre of reportage,” senior lecturer of the department of design and book art at Lviv Academy of Printing Yaroslav Kuts said in his announcement of Pushchenko’s exhibition. “We generally call reportage sketches ‘studies,’ but these are not studies, but full-scale paintings, and of quite a considerable size... We were taught that ‘in time of war the arts are silent,’ but it has turned out to be quite the opposite. The arts shout louder than bullets and shells. These 110 portraits from life and 7 oil studies form a kind of a monument to life created at the frontlines. Some people take weapons to war, while Pushchenko takes paints and a brush. And it is amazing and exciting!”
The artist himself thinks that by painting volunteers, he captured on the canvas a few pages of the history of the Ukrainian people. The display will continue at the Palace of the Arts until January 28.
