Village Above the Dnipro

Село над Дніпром

Year1972

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions46 × 110 cm

LocationL'Art Gallery, Kyiv

A panoramic view of a settlement on the high bank of the Dnipro, one of the lyrical counterparts to Zhuhan's industrial subjects.

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About the Artist

Volodymyr Zhuhan

1926–2008

Volodymyr Zhuhan (1926–2008) was a Ukrainian painter from the Dnipro region and one of the originators of the Ukrainian industrial landscape. A Second World War veteran, he built a career around the scenery, rivers and heavy industry of Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava oblasts. He was made a Merited Artist of Ukraine in 2006.

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Movement

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

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