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The Carpathians

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Ж-7008
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: The Carpathians
Date of creation: 1972
Country: the Ukrainian SSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: original technique
Material: fibreboard mixed media
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 91 x 116.5

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: landscape
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 artwork belongs to a series of landscapes that combine the results of extensive study of real space with constructing a landscape image, essentially a mythopoetic archetypal generalisation. The complex colour scheme, which combines cold and warm tones, the use of metallic pigments and the approach to styling contribute to forming a somewhat detached and mystical image. It simultaneously contains recognizability and a clear connection to the prototype while having a surrealist undertone. The latter is enhanced by the specific composition of the group of two mountains in the background in the left part of the painting. The alternation of massive and monumental parts, detailed fragments, and the deliberate desolation of the landscape play a significant role in forming the figurative and emotional structure. Equally significant in this sense is the author's approach to lighting, which complicates the identification of the time of day and appears to depict twilight or dusk. In the artwork, Vasyl Poliovyi appears not only as an experimental painter but as an explorer of how a person perceives the landscape and how it can become a reflection of them.

Inscriptions

In the bottom left corner there is an inscription: ВП 72

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

The Carpathians

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