From Kharkiv to Warsaw: how a painter's path took shape
Table of contents
I am usually introduced as a Ukrainian painter living in Poland. Formally correct, but there is a longer story behind that phrase, and it explains why I paint what I paint.
Lyashchivka
I was born in 1959 in the village of Lyashchivka in the Cherkasy region. That is central Ukraine, not far from the Dnieper — the same river Bulgakov was bound to all his life.
There is nothing of the village in my work. No landscapes, no cottages, no genre scenes of rural life. That is deliberate: I do not think a birthplace obliges you to paint it.
But something from there has stayed — a sense of space and silence in which a human figure matters precisely because everything around is empty. It shows in compositions where two or three people are in the frame and nobody else.
Dnipropetrovsk
The art education began there — pedagogical university, art faculty.
That is not an academy or an institute of arts. A pedagogical education gives the fundamentals — drawing, painting, composition — but teaches you to pass on a craft rather than to be an author. Many stop there.
For me it proved useful: the basics were laid down firmly and without pretension. Later I had to relearn how to think, but not how to use my hand.
Kharkiv
In 1983 I was admitted to the Kharkiv Institute of Applied Arts. The specialism: monumental painting and interior architecture. I graduated in 1989.
That decision determined everything that followed, though I did not understand it at the time.
Monumental painting is work with large format and with space. A wall painting cannot be seen whole from one point: the viewer walks along it, and the composition has to work in movement. That teaches you to think not in pictures but in sequences.
That is exactly where the cycles in my work come from. The habit of thinking in series rather than single canvases came from monumental painting.
Interior architecture gave the second thing: the understanding that an image exists in space and not on its own. A work torn from its context reads differently.
Kharkiv in those years was a strong school. A city with an avant-garde tradition, where people who remembered the twenties were still working. It was not spoken about aloud, but it was passed on.
The year 1990
I came to Poland in 1990, at thirty-one.
The reasons were prosaic — that moment when everything was falling apart and people were leaving. But the choice of Poland in particular proved fortunate, not from the point of view of daily life but of work.
Poland at the start of the nineties was a place where art mattered. Not as an industry — there was no industry yet — but as a way of talking about what had just happened to the country. That coincided with my own condition.
The first solo exhibition took place in 1991, in the building of the Sejm. A year after arriving, almost without the language.
What Poland changed
Stańczyk appeared. The court jester of the Polish kings, entitled to tell the truth — a figure from someone else's history who turned out to be about me. He entered the work two or three years after the move and has stayed.
That is an ordinary mechanism: an emigrant finds in a new culture what explains his own position.
The palette changed. The Ukrainian tradition I trained in leans towards saturation and warmth. Polish painting is more restrained, with a large role for grey and muted tones.
I did not consciously switch to a Polish palette, but over thirty years it seeped in. Now my work looks restrained to a Ukrainian eye and too warm to a Polish one.
Distance appeared. This is the main thing emigration gives a painter. You are no longer inside the context but beside it. Things taken for granted at home become visible.
The cycles Animal Farm and Critique of Power came from exactly this. From a distance you see the mechanics that up close you take for life itself.
Three identities
Formally I am a Ukrainian painter in Poland.
In reality it is more tangled. I have Ukrainian origins, a Polish context, and work that most often refers to Russian and world literature — Bulgakov, Cervantes, Orwell.
This mixture is not a problem but working material. A painter belonging to one tradition paints within it. Someone belonging to several has to choose a language each time — and that forces thought.
Frequently asked questions
Do you return to Ukraine?
A question with no short answer. The work is not exhibited there and connections with the art community broke off long ago. But Ukrainian origin is present in it, though not as subject matter.
Does the training in monumental painting affect easel work?
Yes, and more strongly than you would expect. The habit of thinking in series and in space rather than in single frames came from there. All my cycles are essentially monumental thinking in easel form.
Why exhibitions only in Poland and Austria?
Exhibition geography comes from circumstance, not from plans. Warsaw, Łódź, Sopot and Vienna are places where people willing to take on the organising happened to be.
In what language do you think about the work?
Painting has no language, and that is its advantage. Thirty-five years in a foreign-language environment have not affected the work — unlike what would happen to a writer.
The catalogue of available works with prices is on the site. The works can be seen at the Warsaw studio by arrangement.
