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Autumn in the Carpathians

Zenovii Flinta

Basic information

ID: Ж-6650
Author: Zenovii Flinta
Name: Autumn in the Carpathians
Country: the Ukrainian SSR
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: oil painting tempera painting
Material: fibreboard oil tempera
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 68.3 x 84.2

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: landscape
Plot: Landscape

Information about author

Author: Zenovii Flinta
Artist's lifetime: 1935–1988
Country: Poland, the Ukrainian SSR
Biography: Zenovii Flinta (1 September 1935, Toky village – 2 April 1988, Lviv) was a Ukrainian ceramicist, painter, and graphic artist. Member of the Ukrainian Union of Artists, Honoured Artist of the UkrSSR. He was born in the village of Toky, Ternopil region. After graduating from a seven-year school, he entered the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts, Department of Decorative Painting. He graduated in 1959. In 1959–1963, he studied at the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, Department of Art Ceramics. From 1963, he taught at the painting department of the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts. From 1965 to 1975, he worked as a teacher of ceramics at the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts. In 1967, he interned at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1968, at the Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw Academies of Fine Arts. From 1970, he worked at the Lviv Ceramics and Sculpture Factory. In 1971, he headed the decorative and applied arts section of the Lviv branch of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. Since 1960, he has participated in Republican exhibitions and, since 1968, in all Union exhibitions. He participated in the International Biennial of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy, 1973) and Vallauris (France, 1974). In 1982–1983, there was a successful group exhibition of Zenovii Flinta, Oleh Minko, and Liubomyr Medvid in Lviv, Kyiv, and Vilnius. In 1985, a solo exhibition of Z. Flinta's works was held in Lviv, including paintings, graphics, and ceramics. Conceptually and plastically, many of Z. Flinta's paintings are inspired by the works of P. Cézanne, P. Picasso, G. Braque, O. Archipenko, F. Léger, H. Matisse, and the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1930s. The movement of the sixties, Roman Selskyi and Karlo Zvirynskyi, had a significant influence on his creative search. Many of Z. Flinta's paintings are characterised by allegorism and the revelation of deep philosophical meanings through visible objects, forms, and colour combinations. In painting, the artist preferred pastels and tempera. In ceramics, he concentrated on the technique of painting to achieve pictorial and graphic effects. The artist's early works are characterised by the use of ornamental motifs from the folk art of the Carpathians. The colour palette is based on a combination of brown, green, and ochre with the addition of black and white.

Object description

Original and versatile, based on the affirmation of the intrinsic value of the artistic form, Zenovii Flinta's creative work is imbued with philosophical reflections, the search for the eternal in the transient; it is full of Post-Impressionist echoes. One of the symbolic images in the master's landscapes, in particular, "Autumn in the Carpathians", are mountains associated with the binary oppositions of "near–far", "top–bottom", and "sky–earth". The figurative structure of the landscape was shaped by the perception of the mountain as a place that unites heaven, earth, and the other world, as well as the divine and the human, as recorded in folk cosmogony. The juxtaposition of the lifelong cycle of nature and the microcosm of the Carpathian gardens gave the work its meaning. The lowered horizon line became an artistic means of embodying the idea, emphasising the majesty of the seemingly spiritual, eternal mountain peaks. The "horizon of earthly existence" was visualised by a rhythmic line of fences and a series of elegant farmsteads. The drama of nature's disappearance was reflected in heavy grey clouds, ominous black shadows, green stillness, and flashes of crimson and ochre.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Autumn in the Carpathians

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