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Sketch for a Mosaic on Public Transport Stop Walls in Dubyna Village, Stryi District, Lviv Region

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Ж-8169
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for a Mosaic on Public Transport Stop Walls in Dubyna Village, Stryi District, Lviv Region
Date of creation: 1974
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: original technique
Material: cardboard mixed media
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 19.6 x 16.5

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: animal painting
Plot: Allegory
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 belongs to a series of sketches for the mosaic design of a public transport stop in the village of Dubyna. The figure of a quadrilateral with two right angles (a stylised marking of the side wall of an architectural object) is depicted on cardboard in a pictorial technique. A male European elk (possibly Alces alces) is on the plane, standing at full length with his body in profile with a slight offset and his head at an angle. In the background are silhouetted images of oak leaves and other difficult-to-identify organic motifs (it isn't easy to establish whether these are depictions of a forest, a woodland or a clearing). The composition is balanced, built around the central figure and executed in a warm ochre-red scheme with tonal and colour accents. This sketch was implemented using the mosaic technique with slight modifications to the composition and colour (at the public transport stop, it was executed in a mixed colour range with touches of rich synthetic ultramarine blue). As of early 2023, the original mosaic was in a satisfactory state of preservation.

Inscriptions

In the bottom right corner of the image, there is an inscription: "В. Полев 74"

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery