The Transcarpathian Museum of Folk Architecture and Way of Life is hosting Luhansk artist Iryna Mezeria’s works on glass in the exhibition “Moments of Life,” once again showing that east and west of Ukraine are together.
Mezeria is a native of Luhansk, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Psychology at Luhansk Regional Institute of Postgraduate Pedagogical Education (now moved to Sievierodonetsk) and, moreover, a talented artist. Her works are extremely versatile in their genre choice, ranging from landscapes to still lifes, portraits, religious stories, and abstract paintings. She likes to experiment and create new compositions on glass. Her creative portfolio includes over 100 paintings and many painted glass vessels.
As Mezeria says, this is her first exhibition in Zakarpattia and in the west of Ukraine as a whole. She exhibited previously in Luhansk region, and later in Kyiv and Irpin, where the family was forced to move because of the war. The artist says: “The war divides people, and art can offer an occasion for dialog and solidarity between people from different regions holding different ideological beliefs.”
The woman began working to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming an artist at 45 and without proper education. She realized that “instead of fearing anything, we have to do what we want to.” All her creative work was stranded in the occupied territory, and only when a truce was announced, she and her husband went home for a while. Surprisingly, all the paintings had survived, so they brought them to their new home whole and intact, having gone through checkpoints and spent time moving along roads destroyed by explosions of shells and littered with fragments of mines.
Works presented at the exhibition are impressively diverse in their genre and subject choice. However, none of them is war-themed: Mezeria says that it is a very difficult and painful topic for her, which she does not want to think about, but which, like an open wound, pains her mind, heart, and soul. Even while staying in Zakarpattia, she woke up on one stormy night with a scream “Missiles incoming!”
Mezeria’s Uzhhorod colleague, master of painting on glass Viktoria Kuzma said that she was “impressed by the fine technique used in the works of the Luhansk artist. The first impression is that this is beaded embroidery.”
The head of the Zakarpattia Regional Branch of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, People’s Artist of Ukraine Borys Kuzma noted when congratulating the artist on the occasion of her debut in Zakarpattia that “there are very few artists working in this technique in Ukraine, and barely anyone in Zakarpattia. Meanwhile, the works of the Luhansk artist are striking in their originality, elegance, fine details, and distinctive expression of the wealth of her inner world and philosophical perception of life.”
