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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-344
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): 107.5 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 work is a sketch from a series of mural projects at the Lviv State Leather Enterprise (mural "History of Leather Production" for the institution's club, 1980). This cardboard, along with Г-ІІ-341 and Г-ІІ-342, depicts a work genre scene from contemporary leather production at an industrial enterprise at that time. A vertical composition with a rich colour scheme illustrates the process of soaking raw materials, in which four characters participate. In the foreground on the left side, two individuals are moving a small four-wheeled vehicle loaded with a certain amount of materials. The intensity of their efforts, evident in the figures' dynamics, showcases the feedstock's heavy weight and conveys how complex and challenging the work process is. On the right side, a relatively static figure of a woman is portrayed at a certain distance from the group. She is standing with a hose turned on, ensuring the continuity of the technological process. In the depths of the composition, also on the right side, there is a figure of a man without recognisable facial features facing the viewer, holding a forked tool in his left hand. Beside him is a container from which the raw material is being moved using a mechanical manipulator. All the figures are dressed in specialised clothing with knee-high closed footwear. The unique dynamics of the tonal patches, active use of broken lines, zigzag shapes, and the intensity of the colour scheme (red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue - almost spectral) are in sharp contrast in several parts. It brings this artwork closer to Vasyl Poliovyi's later practices, particularly the American period of the early 1990s.

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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