“Special Fund”

repressed art

21.09.2018 – 27.11.2018

The exhibition is based on the principle of invading the works of Igor Gusev in the main exposition of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum. Gusev transforms the images of the museum’s famous paintings by the method of deconstruction, using the glitch effect – a technique familiar to fans of the artist, which he successfully uses to rethink classical painting. To create the installation in the ballroom of the museum, Gusev uses antique frames from the Museum of Western and Oriental Art – frames that were also once housed in the university museum.

Special Fund: repressed art

Most of the presented works are exhibited in Odesa for the first time. Olexandr Bogomazov and Tymofiy Boychuk, Vadym Meller and Antonina Ivanova, Oksana Pavlenko and David Burliuk, Pavlo Golubyatnykiv and Konstantin Eleva, Anatoliy Petritsky and Sukher-Ber Rybak, Viktor Palmov and Abram Cherkasky – more than three dozen names of famous artists whose works in 1937 seemed to be forever hidden from the public: “they have no artistic or museum value and like the works of the people’s enemies are subject to destruction”.

Thus, the special fund includes works by artists, most of whom have long been erased from the history of Ukrainian art. Долі майстрів склалися трагічно, багато хто з представленних митців були розстріляні у 1937 році. All of them, despite their unique artistic style and outlook on life, was shot dead on charges of counter-revolutionary nationalist activity. Some received significant prison terms; only those who left Ukraine in time managed to survive. And those who remained and escaped repression changed their lives and creative manners forever.

The exhibition in Odesa is not a literal repetition of the NAMU exhibition. Complemented by works from the collection of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, it demonstrates the roll call between the two museums. For example, next to Anatoliy Petrytskyi from Kyiv, his “Odesa” work “Rest” is presented – in both works the color of the Ukrainian avant-garde is recognizable. Along with the portrait of Mykola Bilyashivsky, director of the Kyiv City Art, Industry and Science Museum (now the National Art Museum), a portrait by Mykhailo Kozyk, and a portrait of Bilyashivsky by Mykhailo Zhuk is exhibited, who lived and worked in Odesa from the 1920s until his last days. Along with the works of the Odesa artist Teofil Fraerman, the meeting which will be a surprise for the audience, the work “Interior” from the collection of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum is presented.

Comparing the Ukrainian art of the 1920s and 1930s with the Russian one, one cannot ignore the obvious differences, in particular, if the artists of the most important group in Soviet Russia “OST” gravitated to the expressive means of their German contemporaries, which were declared degenerative art, Ukrainian artists time stylistically closer to the art of early Mussolini’s Italy, where there was a turn from futurism to neoclassicism. This gives grounds to use the term Ukrainian Novecento about the Ukrainian art of that period and to consider it in the pan-European context of the transformation of the avant-garde of the early 1920s into the totalitarian art of the 1930s and 1940s.

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