Within the framework of the project “Art Map of Ukraine” which promotes information about art centers, schools, and unique creative personalities, the Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine presented painting, graphic, drawing, and applique work of Karlo Zvirynsky (1923-97).
Artist’s daughter Khrystyna Zvirynska-Chaban delivered a speech at the opening of the exhibition “My Road to Art.” Khrystyna together with her son Yurii brought 50 works from the family collection to Kyiv.
“Today the art work of Karlo Zvirynsky is presented in retrospect, here you can see works created in different techniques, from first drawings (Dialogue, Spinning, the series Mother, Self-Portrait – 1942-44) and realistic oil paintings (Haystack in the Field, The Carpathians, Stile – 1946-52) to the conceptual art of the late 1950s – mid-1960s: application work (Abstraction, Application, Trees), paintings (Blue Still Life, Little Things. Whisper), using natural materials (Relief III), graphics (Forest and Bird – linocut, Figure – monotyping), ex libris for the exhibition posters,” stressed Khrystyna ZVIRYNSKA-CHABAN.
Natalia Diachenko-Zabashta and Halyna Duhas shared with us their sincere memories about the artist and teacher, who was always sensitive and attentive to the young people.
Zvirynsky’s life was quite majestic and yet very dramatic. Creative development and work of the artist occurred at the time, when bold search for formshaping in European art, with the unique traits of the creative personality, were persecuted and the officials of that time considered the works of the master to be “a manifestation of bourgeois nationalism and spreading of formalist ideas in art.” As a person and a patriot Zvirynsky did not sustain the instructions of the totalitarian regime and was punished for this.
Today, his art work is recognized in European and global context of the fine arts development, while in Ukraine it was banned until 1992.
This reminds of the time of Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s-1930s when a pleiad of prominent artists led by Mykhailo Boichuk selflessly worked to create a national style in monumental art. Some of them were destroyed, and the others were branded as “formalists” and “nationalists,” which for many years kept them out of cultural process. Zvirynsky got engaged in conceptual art back in the 1950s and boldly defended his aesthetic credo. Today, his legacy beyond time, space, and style is still waiting for its researchers and has every reason to enter the global art context.
Artist’s early series of art works (Relief Art, 1957-62; Road, 1962; Tangle, 1962-75; Supernatural, 1965) mark Zvirynsky’s development away from the influence of realism and the beginning of abstract artistic search in painting, application work, color relief from paper, wood, and on canvas. The artist searched for and found his own color scheme (“I was always drawn to color”), determined the topics that he was most concerned with. They reach out to the scale of all humankind – life and death, natural and supernatural, the eternal struggle between light and darkness as the essence of the life of the universe. Maestro turns back to these issues a lot during his creative life (Little Things, 1966-94; Epitaph, 1961-94; Shore, 1990; Twilight and Silver and Cooper, 1995).
“I have never been engaged in purely formal search. I always put some idea, implication, or plan in every art work I create. I want to evoke certain associations with the reality in my audience. My art work could be described as an attempt to keep pace with the spirit of time,” this was the artist’s definition of his understanding of art work.
In his compositions the artist used various nature materials for creating lights and darks of the art work, contrast in forms, texture against conventional painting. All of this expanded perception of the art work surface, emotional impact on the viewer.
Large part of Zvirynsky’s art work is sacred painting – paintings in Lviv churches: Church of the Transfiguration of Christ and the Church of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (40 icons) following iconographic schemes and painting techniques, as well as murals in churches around the city. For a short period of time Zvirynsky ran the Saint Luke School of Icon Painting at the Monastery of the Stoudites. “All of my painting is a prayer. I tried to express in it my awe for the majestic creation of God. All of my paintings were inspired by this feeling. It is absolutely sincere,” said the artist.
It is difficult to imagine Zvirynsky artist without his pedagogical work, which he began after graduation in 1953, first in his “Evening Meetings with Young People” and later in the School of Applied and Decorative Arts and Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts. “It seemed to me that I had to do everything I could to help students maintain their natural talent and, at the same time, develop their human dignity and civic awareness. I wanted them to know who they are, what they should do, and where they should be going,” this is how Zvirynsky defined his mission as a teacher.
