A retrospective of works by Olena Ovchynnikova – the artist’s first solo exhibition in her homeland since independence. The exhibition includes more than 50 works created by the artist in Ukraine and in emigration (USA). These are paintings, watercolors, prints, and book graphics.
“This is a major event in the cultural life of Ukraine. The project aims to rediscover an extraordinary Ukrainian artist, underestimated and still almost unknown in her homeland, to inscribe her name and creative legacy into the chronicle of the national revival of Ukrainian art, which went down in history as the ‘Sixtiers’ movement,” says exhibition curator, art historian Oksana Pidsukha. “We also strive to pay tribute to the 87-year-old artist, who lives in the USA but continues to enrich Ukrainian culture.”
The earliest of the presented works are the series of linocuts “People from Verkhovyna” (1959–1960). The exhibition also features a number of works inspired by the ancient village of Khalepe, near Trypillia, and its inhabitants.
For the first time, the exhibition presents the artist’s sketches for the mural in the Kyiv hotel “Intourist”, created in 1990. Later, the wall painting was destroyed, and the watercolor sketches – “Hopak” and “Krakowiak” – are the only things that remain from the artist’s outstanding monumental creation.
The culmination of the exhibition is the series “Decameron”, created by Ovchynnikova in 2008–2020 in the USA and recently transferred to the collection of the Museum of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Kyiv. A profound intellectual and connoisseur of the Middle Ages, the artist fulfilled her “lifelong dream” – to illustrate 13 novellas by Giovanni Boccaccio.
“‘Remember life’ – this is the main creative motto of Boccaccio and Olena Ovchynnikova,” says exhibition curator, art historian Oksana Pidsukha. “This slogan is eternal and contemporary. During plague or war, people must find the strength to go on living. And quoting Boccaccio: ‘…whoever met them on the road would say that death would not take them, and if it did, it would cut them down cheerful.’”
About the artist: Olena Ovchynnikova (born in Kyiv, 1935) is a representative of a renowned Ukrainian artistic dynasty. Her father, artist Vasyl Ovchynnikov, headed the Kyiv Museum of Western and Eastern Art (now the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts) for 42 years. In 1960 she graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute as a graphic artist. She taught at the Kyiv State Art Institute from 1969 to 1982. She is the author of numerous graphic series and individual works on Ukrainian themes, distinguished by her individual “fresco-monumental” style. She illustrated about 25 books, among them “The Feast of Saint Jorgen” by Harald Bergstedt (1967), “The Whirlpool” by Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk (1972), and “The Horsemen” by Yurii Yanovskyi (1987). Since 2001 she has lived and worked in the USA (Homestead, Pennsylvania).