Collector, publisher, art expert, and gallerist Agostino Cordeiro first visited the Arsenal at the end of the summer this year, and he was pleasantly surprised. “To be honest, I did not expect Ukraine to have a museum of this level,” says Cordeiro. “This is a great world-standard museum, I think it has a great future.”
And this future has already started. Artist Ivan Marchuk attended the exhibit and shared his impressions with The Day: “I go to all of the exhibits that are held at the Arsenal, but this is the first time I have been 100 percent satisfied with it. There are no such exposition halls in Europe, so I think our Arsenal will attract more worldwide known artists, and promote ours to Europe. This is going to be a kind of exchange. But the thing that impressed me the most at this exhibit is how people can represent themselves. This high culture, the attitude towards the artist and his work is remarkable. We do not have this, our exhibits look like bazaars, with people displaying their works as they please. Ukraine bitterly lacks this culture.”
The Cordeiros Galley from Portu has organized numerous exhibits in various cities of Europe (including Lisbon, Madrid, and Paris) over the 17 years of its existence. But in Kyiv this project is going to have a special bearing. Says Cordeiro: “It is a great pleasure for us to arrange such a large-scale modern art exposition at the Arsenal. A lot of these works are included in the catalogs of the best museums in the world: Guggenheim, Metropolitan, Tretiakovka, and Reina Sofia.”
The exposition includes 340 works by 60 painters, graphic artists, and sculptors. Among them are such gurus of modern art as Julian Schnabel, Miquel Barcelo, Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Antoni Tapies, and Rafael Canogar. Ukraine has never seen them yet. Art critic Soloviov considers this event to be a breakthrough of integrated European (Spanish and Portugal in particular) art to Ukraine. “This is an example of cultural exchange in the best way ever imaginable. Where else can you see in Ukraine what is being exposed at the Arsenal during these 10 days? And it should be noted that it all happened spontaneously: the Portuguese are people of business, they do not waste time. We managed to execute this project in just two months. These are the classics of modern art, and our people, as well as any educated people, have to see and know this.” Soloviov also notes that the Portuguese artists meet and communicate with their Ukrainian counterparts all the time, both during the exhibit and in the process of getting ready for it. And it is quite possible that a collection of modern Ukrainian art will soon be presented at the Cordeiros Gallery in Portu.
