Stella Beniaminova’s Stedley Art Foundation carries out projects that popularize, above all, the oeuvre of contemporary Ukrainian artists. Many of these projects have demonstrated their new works as well as the development of their art visions in the course of time. “Calendar of Inspiration Flashes,” a just-opened exhibit of Oleksandr Dubovyk, a “guru” of Ukrainian underground culture, is the master’s artistic breakthrough from the stagnation period into the future.
In the 1970s, the artists who did not adhere to the principles of figurative painting within the rigid framework of socialist realism went underground, displaying their works at secret sessions for a narrow circle of selected connoisseurs. They used Aesopian language, so popular at the time, in their theater and literature. This kind of artists could only show themselves in monumental art.
“Life is a sum of instants,” Dubovyk said, unveiling the exhibit. “If something is interpreted as a flash of inspiration, this means that reality is spiritualized. And to view time as a bright event means to live!”
When you look at the exhibited works, you seem to be consulting a secret dictionary and relishing the artist’s freedom of self-expression. Unfortunately, the mosaic “Outer Space” made in the famous Hlukhiv has sunk into oblivion together with the ruined house. Nothing is known either about the breathtaking stained-glass windows “The Wind of Wanderings” – they were created in Feodosia, Crimea.
“In each of his works, Oleksandr Dubovyk carefully sets the correlation of horizontals and verticals, the communications of geometrical figures, fusions and disruptions inside the forms, and clashes between rhythms and rhymes,” exhibit curator Tetiana Voloshyna says. “What really matters for him in the art space are ideas and notions and the way they interact, triggering reciprocal conflicts and vibrations. We can say for sure that the fundamental difference between such notions as ‘idea’ and ‘ideology’ has become a world-view abyss that separates Dubovyk from the old-time artists who served the ‘Moloch’ of socialist realism.”
