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Sketch for a Mural on the Territory of the Lviv State Leather Enterprise (until 1976, the Svitanok Leather Company)

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Г-II-335
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for a Mural on the Territory of the Lviv State Leather Enterprise (until 1976, the Svitanok Leather Company)
Date of creation: 1970s (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: cardboard pastel
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 108 x 84

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 belongs to a series that was executed in the murals of the Lviv Leather Enterprise (1980). Now the murals are lost. The composition is interpreted in the most abstract manner. The figures are part of a decorative background constructed from a series of saturated ultramarine patches with individual red, yellow, and purple splashes. The interpretation employed by the artist is exceptionally dynamic, transforming this large group of people (9 individuals) sitting in a circle and performing various technological manipulations, as well as two men stretching the leather during the production process, into a cohesive mechanism. The approach to depicting the figures suggests that the events occur in a non-urbanised setting (based on the stylistic elements and the type of cut of certain distinctive elements of ethnographic attire). This is most likely a depiction of a period before the mid-20th century. The sketch is also notable for its representation of modernist ideals, particularly the interpretation of the human body or, rather, the idea of who a person is in the context of society and professional interaction.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for a Mural on the Territory of the Lviv State Leather Enterprise (until 1976, the Svitanok Leather Company)

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