Sketch for the "Space" Mural

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Ж-8185
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for the "Space" Mural
Date of creation: 1970s (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: cardboard tempera
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 24.4 x 45.5

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 is probably intended for the same architectural space as Ж-8181 and Ж-8183. An unpainted rectangular space on the left could indicate either a door or a door frame. The specificity of the image interpretation and the saturation of the individual images, which are stylised decoratively, do not allow us to identify the affiliation of the objects in detail. However, this suggests that the author captured images of space exploration inspired by textual and visual works. In this context, we mean the influence of films, cinematography and special effects by Pavlo Klushantsev. Firstly, the movie "Planet of the Storms" (1961) and its echoes, especially in Stanley Kubrick's popular science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) (based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel), which was shown in the USSR at the VI International Film Festival in Moscow in 1969. The imagery developed by the artist is rich in colour and formal and emotional dimensions. Contrasting colour schemes and tonal accents, the use of imitations of falling objects resembling meteorites, unearthly landscapes and skylines, and the manipulations carried out by specialists in a state of weightlessness, which may be of a research nature, all reflect cinematic moments but can also be part of a dreamlike fantasy about the future of space.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for the "Space" Mural

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