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Ivan Marchuk: Paintings
April 4, 2019 - May 26, 2019
Art at the Institute was delighted to present “Ivan Marchuk: Paintings,” an exhibition centering on a retrospective selection of paintings by the Kyiv-based Ukrainian artist. Co-curated by Walter Hoydysh, PhD, director of Art at the Institute, and Tamara Strypko, this exhibition marked Mr. Marchuk’s first solo showing with The Ukrainian Institute of America. Part landscape, part self-portrait, the widely known and admired painter’s works offer the viewer a profound reflection on his quest through life, his earliest memories, recurrent dreams, and prophetic visions.
Due to popular demand, “Ivan Marchuk: Paintings” exhibition has been extended through May 26, 2019, and new works have been added.
Exhibition hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00 to 6:00 PM.
Please note, the Ukrainian Institute will be closed on May 16, 22 and 23.
Cultivating the highest attention for detail and precision-craftsmanship, Marchuk’s signature works are executed in an elaborate, original technique — drafting hundreds of intertwining fine lines, or filaments, enhancing an illusionistic effect of apparent depth, luminous enamel-like surfaces, and rich gradations of light. Early in his career, he dubbed this manner of painting “plontanism,” a neologism created of the Ukrainian word for the verb “to weave.”
Ivan Marchuk was born in 1936 in Moskalivka, Volhyn region of northwestern Ukraine. He graduated from the Ivan Trush Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (Lviv, Ukraine). He began exhibiting in Moscow in 1979 and Kyiv in 1980. After the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear plant disaster, Marchuk created nightmarish compositions depicting the total destruction of the planet. Until 1988, he was denied membership in the Union of Artists of Ukraine because his themes and style did not conform to the officially prescribed socialist realism. Persecuted by then Soviet authorities, he left the USSR for Australia in 1989, before living in the US and Canada.
In 1996, Marchuk’s series of paintings “Shevchenkiana” and “Voice of My Soul” won him the Shevchenko National Prize, the highest state prize of Ukraine for works of culture and the arts. He eventually returned to permanently settle in Ukraine in 2001. His works have been exhibited in Ukraine, Belgium, Germany, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, and the US. Ivan Marchuk lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Exhibition hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00 to 6:00 PM. Please note, the Ukrainian Institute will be closed on May 16, 22 and 23.
Image: Ivan Marchuk, “Silence All Around,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, 39½ x 39½ inches (100 x 100 cm).
Exhibition co-sponsored by Ukraine International Airlines
