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Sketch

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Г-II-334
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch
Date of creation: 1980s (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: cardboard pastel
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 108.5 x 85

Additionally

Type: graphic art
Genre: symbolic art
Provenance: Handed over to the museum from Vasyl Poliovyi

Information about author

Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Artist's lifetime: b.1936
Country: the USSR, the USA
Biography: Vasyl Poliovyi is a Ukrainian painter and graphic artist, one of the leading authors of Soviet Nonconformist art. He was born on April 22, 1936, in Kryvyi Rih city. The artist's father, Petro Poliovyi, worked as an engineer, and his mother, Oleksandra, was a mathematics teacher. With the start of hostilities on the territory of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the family was evacuated to the Sverdlovsk region (RSFSR). There Vasyl Poliovyi studied in school, and after completing his education in 1954, he entered an art school in Yelets. However, the artist later transferred to the Tavricheskaya Art School (Leningrad, RSFSR) and then to the Higher School of Industrial Art named after Vera Mukhina. After completing his studies, he moved to Moscow, where he worked at an art collective with his wife, artist Yuliia Podohova. He focused mainly on the monumental and decorative design of the interiors and the exteriors of public buildings and governmental institutions. At the same time, he was involved in the circle of nonconformist artists in Moscow and Leningrad, including Dmytro Krasnopevtsev, Anatolii Zverev, Mykhailo Shemiakin, Oleh Tselkov, Eduard Steinberg, Volodymyr Sterlihov, and the Lianozovo Group, as well as writers like Serhii Dovlatov, Yurii Mamleev, and Vladlen Gavrilchik. He participated in unofficial exhibitions, including those in the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, while visiting his brother, the researcher and inventor Renat Poliovyi, the artist created a large cycle of thematic works about Ukraine. Some of them were exhibited in Moscow. Later he joined the Artists' Union of the USSR. In 1972, Vasyl Poliovyi moved to Lviv, where he worked on monumental and easel paintings. During this period, he interacted with the local art community, including Valerii Shalenko, Mykhailo Steinberg, Yurii Sokolov, Okhrim Kravchenko, Margit and Roman Selsky, Anatolii Semahin, art critics Hryhorii Ostrovskyi and Dmytro Shelest, and writer Ihor Klekh. In 1976, Vasyl Poliovyi was expelled from the Artists' Union, which made his professional activity practically impossible. As a result, the artist decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States, where he still lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina.

Object description

The sketch interprets a fantasy story where four characters are flying on a carpet-like object at night. The backdrop of the central part of the composition is a starry sky with stylised astral objects and satellites, including artificial and natural ones (the Waxing Crescent Moon). The modern clothes of the characters (for the 1980s), two men (one of them sitting between two women, the other standing), the openly eroticised outfits of the women with a length of skirts unacceptable for public social norms of the time, and the angles of presentation reinforce the expressive ambiguity of the scene. The figure of a man standing on the far right, with his back to the viewer, facing the stylised planet Saturn, also raises questions. This figure, either opening or removing (or putting on?) a coat, through a gesture uncommon in a domestic context, alludes to performative practices that Theophrastus referred to as the behaviour of a man "shedding his coat and revealing his masculinity". Alternatively, it could be an allusion to Oleksandr Halych's music album "Queen of the Continent" (1971). All the characters are on a flying carpet, which, contrary to the typical images of oriental textiles, is more reminiscent of the modernist asymmetrical works of Alexander Calder or Ray Komai. Next to this group of people is a saddled horse, flying fast (its mane is fluttering in a particular way), its head adorned with a phalera, and its bridle and harness decorated with round-shaped ornamentation.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

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