Artists have always been leaving Ukraine for various reasons. Sometimes they came back, sometimes their oeuvre did. Since completing a graduate course at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts 15 years ago, the sculptor Bohdan Hirny has been living and working in New York. In 1997 he won the US government’s recognition as a highly-gifted artist. He was employed as leading artist for about 10 years at a well-known sculptural company that specialized in very intricate custom work for interiors, facades, and parks, not only in Manhattan but also from Hong Kong to Trinidad and San Francisco.
Yet we will focus not on the commercial sculptures that keep the artist well-fed but on the creative ones that keep his soul alive. “Eternal Flight of the Soul,” a new series of works made by Hirny in the US, champions the perennial idea that art exists for the sake of beauty, harmony, and inspiration.
“What appeals to me is the US neoclassic sculptor Erastus Palmer’s philosophy of an ideal sculpture. The mission of sculptural art is not only to simulate the form, but also to reveal, via the latter, what is best and purest in humanity. Even a fashionable and flawless work will not be perfect unless it rests on and feeds off the dignity of a moral or intellectual impulse. There are things that are eternal and others that are temporary,” the sculptor says. “I want my compositions — no matter where, at home or in an office — to show flare-ups of beauty against the backdrop of humdrum grayness, charge the spectator with the divine and eternal, and make the human soul rise to place where it will be better and happier.”
Every sculptor instills his idea of human nature in the sculpture. Hirny’s oeuvres gravitate towards spiritual themes and express eternal ideas through a certain form. Take Phoenix, the central image is extremely static in spite of the expressiveness and movement of the composition’s other parts. The phoenix is motionless and entrenched – you can feel that it is an eternal bird.
Another work, Moon Rhapsody, shows two — female and male — faces. Like twins of inspiration, they emphasize the dual nature of all that exists. At the same time, feasting their mysterious eyes on other worlds and dimensions, they create a powerful impulse for the human and the divine to blend.
“It took me six years to create my first Little Cloud and only one day to find a composition solution for the second one,” the sculptor explains. “A many-years-long search was crowned with finding a delicate illusion of light, space, and movement.”
Bohdan Hirny’s favorite object is birds. They are shown as an inflorescence of energy that whirls in eddies, asserts life, and exalts our imagination up to the sky. The round sculptural compositions carry the idea of a perpetual rotation in nature and the inevitable change. Mythical birds are simultaneously looking into the past and the future, for the past always carries a seed of the future. Humankind’s oldest idea is expressed here in an up-to-date and easy-to-grasp way. A powerful flap of wings and movement of clouds with barely visible faces, phoenix birds, and mythical firebirds — all the figures of Hirny’s sculptures intertwine into one powerful cluster of energy. This sets up a link between the spectator, a human, and the eternal, the divine.
Each of Hirny’s sculptures has a special aura and creates its own inimitable image. His works almost breathe, filling the space with their own serene thoughts and sensations. Hirny is an entrenched realist in art. This is of special importance in the United States, where there are almost no good realistic schools left. Combining abstract and bold approaches to figures, in which America excels, and blending them with the mastery of realism, the author has created an incredible and original style of his own.
In Ukraine Hirny had the reputation of a professional who knew his work, and continuously experimented with diverse materials. In the US, too, the sculptor worked with the most up-to-date casting composites.
“Arkhypenko was the first to cut a sculpture out of plastic — a transparent material — and lighten it up from inside. I also cast my works in a transparent material (my own technique), and I don’t think they are less valuable than those made of traditional bronze. Everybody is fed up with bronze, while the material from which my sculptures are made is light, ‘sunny,’ and durable. But the main thing is that it allows me to experiment,” the collection’s author explains.
Applying new techniques and materials, Hirny is thus implementing a very American idea, declared as long ago as at the turn of the 20th century. It says that the attitude toward the material shows the extent to which the artist is consonant with his time. The history of American sculpture confirms that this continent actively encouraged sculptors to experiment with all kinds of materials, such as metals, alloy blends, glass, acrylic, papier-mache, and textile. Has this not enriched world art? Has it not become merrier and sunnier thanks to Calder’s mobiles and steel installations at the Storm Art Center? Latter-day materials are a revolt of sorts against the norm, an evaluation of one’s own oeuvre against the backdrop of tradition.
Each of Hirny’s works sprouts from a dialog between the idea and the material. As Michelangelo’s sta-tues are liberated from a lump of marble by superhuman effort, so every turn of the wings of a mystic bird and every face of a celestial cloud, full of mystery and inspiration, is liberated from the air by a similar effort.
Hirny’s “Eternal Flight of the Soul” is a modern-day stylish, joyful, and inspiring collection of works, an apotheosis of the author’s lifelong search. It offers — in good time, in a period of spiritual decline and the triumph of the dollar — an alternative to utilitarian sculptural art.
