While our gallery is closed, we invite you to revisit our past exhibition of wearable and decorative fabric art by Ukrainian artist Anastasiia Podervianska. Curated by Walter Hoydysh, PhD, director of Art at the Institute, this exhibition marked Ms. Podervianska’s first showing in New York.
Redefining the history of art subjects and themes, Ms. Podervianska uses the medium of textile to subvert its culture aura as ‘woman’s work’ and transforms it into colorful, ironic, lively, and, if not, liberating works. Influenced by postmodernist ideas, the two groups of works on display — Country: Horrors and Coatportraits — are the product of experimentation with materials and technique while at the same time confronting important cultural issues such as biblical and Eastern iconography, national and personal identity, popular culture, and socially predetermined roles.
The essential and expressive quality of her works is that of a “multi-language of thread.” Employing hand-stitching and elaborate application, Ms. Podervianska explores the horizontal and vertical qualities of fabric and fiber in order to create dense and lush narrative and pictorial objects, both wearable and decorative. On her part, by placing focus on the materials and the manual, she rethinks the priorities of aesthetic value over utility — what is art and what is craft.
Anastasiia Podervianska is a graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (department monumental painting), in Kyiv, Ukraine. She has exhibited in Dymchuk Gallery, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Tryptych Gallery, and White World Gallery, among others. Her textile works were featured by Voloshyn Gallery at the 2017 running of the Scope Miami Beach art fair and are represented in public and private collections in Ukraine, Germany, Poland, and the USA. Ms. Podervianska lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Photography: Pavlo Terekhov
Music: Dr. Viktor Gribenko
Video: Olena Sidlovych