“The foundation stone is the groundwork of freedom”
Artist from the ATO area Petro Antyp opens a solo exhibit in Kyiv
In the gallery AVS-Art from December 4 through 24 the visitors will be able to see a solo exhibit of artist and sculptor, member of the National Union of Artists and Merited Artist of Ukraine, Petro Antyp, “Foundation Stone,” which presents the works where the master poetizes the natural phenomena and simple things from everyday life and seeks to bring the chaos of the surrounding world to absolute completeness of cosmos.
The current exhibit is not in the same rank with the previous ones, it is substantially different from the previous presentations with Champaign and flowers, typical for peaceful time. The artist found himself in the epicenter of the war: he lost his land and his studio, with great difficulty he saved his son from captivity, because his native Horlivka is in the ATO area at the moment. In spite of his loss, Petro Antyp has not come apart and is now working in Kyiv, confirming the Ukrainian fortitude – it is common knowledge that the strength of mind of a person shows itself during some trials. Going ahead and not betraying one’s principles in spite of the shootings in your native town is heroism. Petro Antyp is a patriot of his homeland, he knows its history and culture, the centuries of human life on the land when generations believed, created, changed, searched, and found.
The choice of the title of the exhibit, “Foundation Stone,” is the artist’s reaction to current events realized in the context of eternal cultural values.
“It is impossible to defeat the Ukrainian culture, because we draw it from the fertile black earth and blessed sun. In the same way in my art I am gathering stone by stone from village to village, from town to town. I gather the lost stones in order to revive our glorious heritage, because the task of an artist in Ukraine, in my opinion, is to combine history, present time, and the future,” Petro Antyp thinks.
The picturesque works by Petro Antyp are interesting for observation and for analysis. There the master combines the brutality, color eccentricity, innuendo, and metaphoricalness with evident materiality of the surrounding world. The canvases become the stream of consciousness of the artist: here his imagination and subjective vision of the world merge in a waterfall game to create new images, which is why the audience always has a pleasant feeling of acuteness and novelty: stereotypes and inclination for one, once found, artistic solution are not at all typical of Petro Antyp.
For the audience it will be really interesting to see his canvases and understand the scale of thinking of this artist, see in every picture an apparently sonorous echo of his inner world. The very subtle and lyrical painting, Colors of Spring and Merge, the poem-picture Children of Harmony, Ukrainian yellow-and-blue Gold of Scythians, in a daring and hospitable manner open before us the way to the world of clean, bright intriguing things that always leave a huge space for individual interpretations.
Petro Antyp is a sculptor, painter, and graphic artist; in 1980-84 he has studied in Penza-based Konstantin Savitsky School of Art at the department of sculpture; in 1982-86 he continued his studies in the artistic studios of V. Tsoi and A. Bem. In 1989 with Serhii Novikov he organized a group of artists which developed in the direction of figurative symbolism “East” in Horlivka and included Kostiantyn Chudovsky and Vadym Leifer.
In 1990 Petro Antyp won a fellowship of the Union of Artists of USSR, in 2007 he received a diploma of the first virtual gallery for professional artists, “Art Addiction Medial Museum” (London) for his painting Infinity. Today his original and bright works are stored in private collections of Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany, and Sweden.
