On April 15 a jubilee exhibition by the Vinnytsia-based artist Mykhailo Mihrin, member of the Ukrainian National Union of Artists, was launched in the Dniprodzerzhynsk History Museum to mark the artist’s 75th birthday anniversary. A considerable part of his works, including 175 paintings and 51 sculptures, is the author’s gift to Dniprodzerzhynsk, the city which has played a great role in his artistic career and which has never released its grip on his soul.
Mihrin dedicated almost half a century to sculpture and painting. His works reveal a variety of themes, a balance of philosophic contrasts and parallel worlds, and a sharp contrast between the sublime and the mundane.
Mihrin’s paintings are executed in a sober color palette. The artist believes that thoughts are colorless, which is why bright shades obstruct mental perception of a work. A man of somewhat stern and reticent disposition, he has his own philosophy, which he willingly shares with those who can read his thoughts. It looks like Dniprodzerzhynsk has such people. Otherwise, why would he made such a generous gesture and give away his works, his most precious possession?
The years spent in Dniprodzerzhynsk (1974-97) are baptized by the artist self as “the chamotte period” (chamotte, or grog, is a sort of clay used in sculpture). Clay is a special material for Ukrainians. It was used to build homes, make kitchenware, and create the effigies of gods worshipped by our ancestors. This is what the master experienced: “Just like God made man of clay, I produced and sent into the world my blissful creatures, using eternal material, chamotte.” His enthrallment with plastic arts resulted in series of sculptures, which became his first successful artistic experience.
The return to his home city of Vinnytsia in 1998 caused a shift in Mihrin’s artistic career. Here he had no opportunity to work with clay. He missed many-dimensional, supple sculptures, radiating the earth’s warmth, which his hands still remembered. However, painting (whose deeper dimensions are open only to visual exploration) helped him master the synthesis of self-expression in several aspects of art, due to which Mihrin rose to a new level of perfection. He learned to speak simply of the complex things and present universally familiar symbols in his own interpretation, from a strikingly unexpected perspective. Spirituality remains the most urgent theme for the artist, because it is the essence of human existence.
Mihrin refers to the current stage of his artistic career as “the period of twigs.” A few years ago he returned to plastic arts, but instead of chamotte now he works with the twigs, which he picked up on his many walks. He uses the naturally twisted branches to implement his concepts. The sculptures, not taller than two feet, are easily interpreted and contain grains of a new knowledge of the soul, the world, and eternity (Divine Judgment, Notches, Fruit, and others).
Maria Slobodianyk is a student of the Dniprodzerzhynsk State Technical University
