Sketch for the "Science and Progress" Mural

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Ж-8179
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for the "Science and Progress" Mural
Date of creation: 1970s (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: paper cardboard tempera
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 27 x 41.7

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: symbolic art
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 sketch of the composition, with its symbolic and stylistic approach characteristic of Soviet modernism, demonstrates a particular chronotope of the idea of scientific knowledge and understanding of the world as a highly complex system yet subject to human comprehension. The concentration of the composition on the central image – Ernest Rutherford's planetary model of the atom and the arrows pointing towards it, along with ray and wave motifs – reveals the concept of the scientific and technological revolution as partly the mastery of the atom and partly the confirmation of ancient concepts (the discrete atomistic structure of matter according to Democritus, where atoms are "weighty, corporeal particles", and the infinite division of "every spark and drop" according to Empedocles). The light and pale background contrasts with the intense parts of the central composition, adding materiality to the realm of the ultra-fine parts that make up the world.

The photo was first published in the article: Khorunzha, H. (2023). Vasyl Poliovyi: calling. Fine Arts, 3–4, 82.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for the "Science and Progress" Mural

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