Our Kulibin

After graduating from Kharkiv Arts College and Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in Kyiv Oleksandr Hnylytsky was a member of informal art societies PARYZKA COMUNA (The Commune of Paris), and INSTYTUTSIA NESTABILNYKH DUMOK (Institution of Unstable Thoughts). He later became one of the leaders in painting of Ukrainian transavantgarde. Hnylytsky was also a Ukrainian pioneer of installation- and video-art. In 2007 the artist (together with his wife and artist Lesia Zaiats) represented Ukraine at the 52nd biennale in Venice, with his multimedia room project Visual Vinyl. Two years later, after a long sickness, Hnylytsky passed away. He died in Kyiv on November 1, 2009.

Hnylytsky presented his project Modesty & Luxury at the artistic forum Art Kyiv 2008. The artist himself stretched canvases onto frames three days before the launch of the exhibition.

“I come back to Ukraine very often, regularly, every other month or two,” the artist had told The Day. By that time he spent two years going back and forth between Munich and Kyiv. “It is always interesting to return here. Everything is smooth and calm in Munich. On the way from home to the airport the landscape hasn’t changed for the last ten years. But here it changes. Two months pass and the horizon is completely different. Twenty years back I told myself I was cosmopolitan. As I grew older, I found myself more in love of my native land, willing to make it better and take better care of it... No, I can’t leave [Ukraine] for Munich, not for half a year, because I feel so happy returning home.”

The Day’s Gallery advises readers to gets to know the artistic work of Hnylytsky, in particular, through comments of art expert and art critic Alisa LOZHKINA.

“Oleksandr Hnylytsky always belonged to the top-five of Ukrainian new wave” said Lozhkina. “That ­ge­neration based itself on transavantgarde — a trend characteristic of ­Ita­lian art and, in fact, a postmodern reinterpretation of modern art. In the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s Ukrainian artists were fascinated with that trend and formed Ukrainian transavantgarde. Hnylytsky was one of the pioneers of the new movement. He became an author of a great number of projects that had a great value for Ukrainian art. Hnylytsky was one of the first artists who began to experiment actively with videoart. He was very creative. Among the artistic click they even called him our Kulibin. He always searched for and could find unusual technical solutions for his projects. Hnylytsky sprang ideas forth and was at the same time a very talented artist. One can see that through all the periods of his artistic work.

“That is why after the 1990s full of experiments, installations and video, in the 2000s he returned to art. This return was very original. He began to create large format works in the style of new realism, which presupposes an interesting approach: an artist attaches importance to small everyday life objects by picturing them in a large scale.

“His works are a part of the golden collection of modern Ukrainian art. However, unfortunately, there is no full-scale museum of modern art in Ukraine. It is out of the question that Hnylytsky and artists of this generation have been given their due because there is no place in Ukraine where one could see and estimate the works of these artists, and therefore is impossible to track the history of Ukrainian art of the two past decades. Hnylytsky is not with us anymore and it is difficult to see a collection of his that would represent him.

“Besides, among young artists there appeared a great number of his epigones. Those are the artists who take advantage of the achievements of the 1990s generation. However, this does not mean that the Hnylytsky’s cause found a mass response. The young artists’ strategy is that they borrow commercially successful moves.

“Artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s were pioneers, they broke up with traditions very sharply and adopted only certain technical moments. Today a different process is taking place: young painters follow the beaten track. Though, it would rather be interesting to see their own ways. That is why it is important that the institutes and centers of modern art would function in a way that they would show young people what was done by their predecessors and would explain that they need not to copy, but rather deve­lop themselves.”