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Woman as a Sign

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7821
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Woman as a Sign
Date of creation: 1998
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 100 x 120

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).

Object description

"Woman as a Sign" is a horizontally oriented work which, despite belonging to the 1997–1998 series (which includes other works from the Gallery's collection, namely "Man and God", "Tower of Babel", "Religious Figures", "Island of Fish" and "Veil of Veronica"), is distinguished primarily by its palette. Instead of the dominant cold blue or brown colours, the artist chooses a hot gamut of red and orange. The tonality, which fills the entire canvas without any interspersions of cold shades, creates an almost fiery, incandescent effect.
The central compositional element of the painting is a female figure depicted in Myroslav Yahoda's characteristic manner: the body is outlined with a thick black line, as if carved or incised on the coloured surface, rather than modelled using chiaroscuro. The woman's head is turned in profile, and her face is rendered with slightly more detail than the rest of the figure: clearly defined cheekbones, large calm eyes and light hair. Her gaze is directed past the viewer – into an indefinite point in space. The body itself is treated in an extremely simplified manner: the elongated, almost boneless line of the shoulders and arms terminates in an open palm holding a small oval object. Obviously, this is a heart-shaped fruit with "stripe-arteries", making a direct reference to the iconography of Eve and the narrative of the Fall, although it is bereft of other attributes of Eden (there is neither a tree nor a serpent in the literal sense).
The key elements of the composition are the vertical black stripes that cross the entire canvas from top to bottom at regular intervals. They can be read simultaneously in two senses: as an abstract architectural or structural motif (pillars, poles) that geometrically organises the space, and as literal bars – a sign of imprisonment, restriction, a cage through which the female figure is depicted and within which she is seemingly contained. Such a duality of perception regarding a structure that is both a constructive element and a prison justifies the work's title. The woman appears here not so much as an individual figure, but as a sign – a symbol embedded into a system that simultaneously forms and restricts her.
In the background, behind the stripes, bright yellow wavy lines emerge. Two wide, arched bands that diagonally cross the upper part of the painting like rays of light, a vortex or a trace of movement, lend additional tension and dynamism to the static composition. In the upper left corner, almost behind the main figure and barely noticeable against the background, a second, pale face appears. It is almost spectral, looking askance and acting as an observer, a double or a witness to the scene, pushed to the very edge of the canvas. This technique of doubling the face, known from the artist's work "Veil of Veronica" where a second face is embedded into the heroine's body, is repeated here in a slightly different form: it is not about the merging of images into a single flesh, but about the presence of an outside gaze watching the main figure from the shadows.
Iconographically, the woman with the symbol of an apple in her hand actualises the image of Eve and the ancestral history of temptation and the Fall, traditionally accompanied by the presence of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the serpent-tempter. Myroslav Yahoda consistently eliminates these narrative elements, leaving only the gesture of the hand holding the fruit. It can be interpreted as a symbol of the human heart, in which both good and evil thoughts are born, transforming the biblical narrative into a timeless, generalised sign. The woman here appears not as a dramatic character, but as an embodiment, the very idea of temptation, choice or knowledge, isolated from the narrative context and placed in an abstract grid-like space. Such a strategy is characteristic of the artist's entire series, where a sacred or biblical motif is not used to illustrate a text, but rather serves as a matrix for constructing a personal, often anxious and tense iconography. In it, the traditional symbol loses its didactic clarity and becomes an existential state rather than a moral warning.
The colour scheme of the canvas only heightens this unease: the hot gamut of red and yellow colours, devoid of cosy or soothing shades, turns the space around the figures into the likeness of hell or a fiery element. This sharply contrasts with the cold, nocturnal, almost heavenly palette of "Tower of Babel" and the canvas "Man and God". If in those works the drama unfolded between the human dimension and transcendence turned upwards, here it is completely transferred to the earthly, corporeal, almost physiologically palpable plane of heat and imprisonment. The Fall appears here as a timeless, persistent and incandescent state.
"Woman as a Sign", along with other works from this series presented to the Gallery as a gift from the Lviv City Council on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of the institution, testifies to the consistency with which Myroslav Yahoda developed the theme of biblical and sacred subjects in 1997–1998. This creative layer reveals not so much religious illustrativeness as the artist's attempt to express his own deeply personal experiences of restriction, guilt, temptation and isolation through the language of ancient iconographic models.

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Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Woman as a Sign

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