All the appraisers of Ukrainian fine arts remember the exhibit of the Transcarpathian school of painting held at the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art a little less than a year ago. That was the fifth part of the “Ukraine’s Artistic Map” project. Earlier, the museum had displayed about 500 works by artists from Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Crimea. Among the Transcarpathian painters’ canvases at that exhibit were also the works of Oleksandr Hromovy. And now it is a new meeting with the master, this time as part of a solo exhibition.
Incidentally, it is the artist’s first solo exhibit in the capital of Ukraine. One of the master’s abstract works is titled “A Moment in Manifestations” – the Moments of Oleksandr Hromovy’s Life in Landscapes, Still Lifes, Portraits, and… “Mirages.” On the whole, the Kyiv exposition presents over 40 pictures Hromovy painted from 2005 to 2015.
Hromovy was born in 1958 at the settlement of Blumenfeld founded by German colonists in the late 19th century (now Krasnopillia, Mykolaiv oblast). In 1993 he graduated from the School of Arts and Graphics at the Odesa Ushinsky Pedagogical Institute. Oleksandr has been living and working for many years in Uzhhorod. He has repeatedly staged his exhibits in Transcarpathia and abroad, particularly in Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia. It is this artistic integration of Hromovy that must have singled him out at the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit a year ago. For no matter what regional school of painting an artist belongs to, his life experience, memories, ideas, and interests cannot be limited by the locality of his or her residence.
“I am interested in the old school of the 1930s, the oeuvre of Robert Falk, Martiros Saryan, and, naturally, Adalbert Erdeli,” the artist says. Why “naturally”? As is known, Erdeli was one of the founders of the Transcarpathian school of painting, who was influenced by the works of Paul Cezanne. French “notes” can also be noticed in Hromovy’s artworks. These intertwined artistic traditions have formed the master’s particular painting style. Because of this, his pictures express in a very special way the Black Sea coast-related motifs of his youth and the Transcarpathian region, which has become his second homeland.
