Crimea. Morske Village

Zenovii Flinta

Basic information

ID: Ж-5828
Author: Zenovii Flinta
Name: Crimea. Morske Village
Date of creation: 1981
Country: the Ukrainian SSR
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: oil painting tempera painting
Material: cardboard canvas oil tempera
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 70.4 x 85

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

The symbolic, allegorical nature of Z. Flinta's work is reflected in landscapes, particularly "Crimea. Morske Village" (1981), where the semantically capacious image of the mountain is combined with the archetype of the path. Thus, the sun-burnt southern mountain slopes are associated with the binary oppositions of "near–far", "top–bottom", and "sky–earth". The image refers to the ancient cosmogonies of various civilisations, in which, rising from the original Ocean, the mountain structures space and time. An important aspect of the image is the culturally articulated perception of the mountain as a place of transition from one plane of existence to another, a "ladder to heaven", a symbol of spiritual growth, movement towards the absolute, and renunciation of earthly passions. The opposition of the eternal – the divine and natural, and the human, transient, is visualised by juxtaposing a mountain range and a string of small huts. The almost monochrome brown and ocher colouring serves to visualise the beginnings of existence, the important and essential. The means of creating an artistic image are spherical space and a low horizon line, thanks to which the mountain landscape acquires epic grandeur and the whole world is perceived as full of meanings and values.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Crimea. Morske Village

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