Island of Fish

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7817
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Island of Fish
Date of creation: 1998
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 130 x 100

Additionally

Type: painting
Provenance: Courtesy of Lviv City Coucil on the 95th anniversary of Lviv Art Gallery

Information about author

Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Artist's lifetime: 1957–2018
Country: Ukraine
Biography: Myroslav Yahoda (23 August 1957 – 12 March 2018) was one of the most consistent and original Lviv artists of the last third of the twentieth – early twenty-first centuries. In his mature period, the artist often deliberately avoided participating in group projects, and the curators who collaborated with him preferred solo exhibitions as a form that allowed the development of an original narrative of his visual world.
He studied at Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Printing Institute (according to Volodymyr Stasenko – graduate of 1987). In his practice, he combined easel painting, graphic and poetic experiments, and turned to scenography, particularly in collaboration with Mariia Veres. Myroslav Yahoda's creative biography spans more than three decades of active exhibition activity: from the first painting exhibitions in Poland and Slovakia in the early 1990s (Lublin, Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Rzeszów, Wrocław, Medzilaborce) to major retrospectives of the 2010s. These include the exhibitions "I + God = A" ("Dzyga" Gallery, 2006), an individual space within the project "Red Book: Soviet Art in Lviv in the 1980s and 1990s" (PinchukArtCentre, 2018), the monumental retrospective "Am I Here – Am I There?!" (Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery, 2019) and the intimate yet emotionally expressive exhibition of the painting "Holodomor" in the Boim Chapel (2016).
It should be emphasised that the paintings and drawings by Myroslav Yahoda defy easy classification, and therefore researchers of the artist's work often use the artist's own neologisms, such as "Chereposlov" (the eponymous title of a 2002 poetry collection), to describe the author's individual optics. Crucial to understanding the artist's artistic cosmogony is the concept of "Distance Zero" (the eponymous title of a 2006 poetry collection) – a state in which a person exists on the boundary between the present and the infinite space of time, without clearly defined points of support, much like Redrick Schuhart from "Stalker" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm). The artist himself called this state "cosmic space" – a temporary stay outside the established coordinates of existence. In this sense, he is sometimes compared to Francis Bacon, for whom chance was more important than rational intellect: the images created by such art, in essence, defy mental comprehension in the manner inherent to them. Despite these frequent comparisons of Myroslav Yahoda's practice, the author himself was sceptical of Francis Bacon and believed that he lacked emotionality and humanity, noting the "mechanical" nature of his writing. Instead, he emphasised that for him, what was important in painting was not the finished canvas as a product, but rather the experience – and necessarily a difficult one – during the process of painting.
The early period of the artist's work, traditionally described as the second half of the 1980s and referred to as the "Dark Period", has a resonance with Myroslav Yahoda's expressionist poetry, with its characteristic two- and three-line neologisms, which are variations on a single theme: the human being exists simultaneously in several realities. A recurring theme in Myroslav Yahoda's work is loneliness, not as a psychological state, but as an existential constant that gradually "consumes" the individual and drives a simultaneous search for dissolution and one's own integrity. Researchers of his heritage describe the artist's time as the "Era of Universal Separations" (after Yukio Mishima, with whose translator, Grigory Chkhartishvili, Myroslav Yahoda was personally acquainted), in which true rarity and a miracle is not separation, but reunion.
Myroslav Yahoda's work is inextricably linked to a fundamental rejection of most attributes of modern consumer society, and this distance was for him not something external, but a way of life: the artist consciously distanced himself not only from people, but also from established iconographic and cultural conventions. This is a fundamental difference between his work and the mysticism and visionary style of Jakob Böhme (for details, see https://lvivgallery.org.ua/sites/default/files/verstka_yahoda_optimized.pdf): Myroslav Yahoda's art has a rather post-modernist character, and parallels should be sought not in esoteric traditions, but in the experience of American abstractionism and British expressionism.
The artist's oeuvre is often described in terms of "shocking content" – so sincerely does he work with the body and the boundaries of human existence. At the same time, scholars note that, despite his radical language, Myroslav Yahoda remains an organic artist, unique to Lviv – a city whose "climatic and socio-psychological conditions" contributed to the birth of art that is simultaneously meaningful and hopeless, yet rather apocalyptic in its essence.
Myroslav Yahoda often demonstratively turned to the work of the American musician Tom Waits, whose heavy, "painful" voice serves as an audio parallel to the artist's visual language (which, according to the recollections of colleagues, often served as a constant background in his studio). In the artist's practice, there are also broader philosophical references, in particular, the idea of cultural decline after Auschwitz (after Theodor Adorno), reflecting a definitive reappraisal of the understanding of human nature in the second half of the twentieth century. In one of his interviews (for details, see https://varianty.lviv.ua/publikatsiyi/myroslav-yahoda-ya-stvoryv-svii-svit-i-ya-shchaslyvyi), the artist noted that for years he had practically not left his basement studio and did not even visit the centre of Lviv. This was a conscious choice of seclusion as a condition for creativity, and he named the source of his images as rather the magic, mysticism and energy of Lviv itself, but of that "old" one which, according to the artist, no longer exists (2014). As researchers note: "Often the constructs proposed by the artist in verbal and visual forms so clearly allow one to read the intonations of delirium that it is practically impossible to distance oneself from this impression. However, to reduce everything to the latter would be not only fragmentary but also completely irresponsible. As of today, opinion has the opportunity to fluctuate from acceptance to denial, from recognition to sharp criticism, but what it really is can only be said from a certain distance. The fact is that Myroslav Yahoda lived and worked at a specific time in a specific place; his personal choice became the basis for the specificity of a practice that is rather a phenomenon from the realm of cultural anthropology, and not just creativity. Myroslav Yahoda became the simultaneous director, screenwriter, set designer and main actor of his life, after all, just like any other individual integrated into social life" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm).

Inscriptions

The painting was created in the same year as "Religious Figures" and is clearly resonant in its internal logic, as both works date back to the period when Myroslav Yahoda was already consciously constructing his own space of being, parallel to the official one – an ecology of seclusion in his studio.
The title "Island of Fish" eloquently hints at the image of island isolation, which is crucial for understanding the artist. The famous quote by John Donne (via Ernest Hemingway): "No man is an island, entire of itself", which researchers have applied in the context of analysing the artist's oeuvre, is rather inverted here. The island in the title of the work is not a negation, but an affirmation of another form of being – a watery, underwater, suppressed and hidden world.
The fish motif in the oeuvre of the author, whose works scholars link to symbolist and post-abstract traditions, where the return to recognisable primordial forms (plants, animals) serves as a means of a metaphysical rather than descriptive narrative, functions not as an element of a domestic or marine landscape, but as an archetypal, almost unconscious image – a silent, voiceless creature that exists in a different, hermetic environment, inaccessible to the eye. An island inhabited by fish rather than people is a transformation of the very idea of sanctuary: not land in the middle of water, but water that has become a home; a world in which habitual oppositions (land/elements, internal/external space) lose their validity. This is consistent with the general logic of Myroslav Yahoda's late oeuvre, namely the construction of a catastrophic but habitable space – an "environment of exiles from paradise", where the artist sought support on an individual level outside official social structures.
While "Religious Figures" speaks the language of the sacred, appealing to the transcendent dimension of human experience, "Island of Fish" leans more towards a domestic, corporeal, almost embryonic state. The fish here appears not as a Christian symbol, but rather as a voiceless creature, faceless in the human sense, representing the ultimate image of depersonalisation. At the same time, it is a sanctuary in which individuality dissolves but does not completely disappear.
Both works share a common history of provenance, as they entered the Gallery's collection as a gift from the Lviv City Council on the occasion of the museum's 95th anniversary. Together, they constitute an important part of a small but representative collection of late works by the artist whose oeuvre – simultaneously painterly, graphic and poetic – remains a subject of cultural anthropology rather than a clear artistic biography.

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