Ihor Havryshkevych
Ігор Гавришкевич
b. 1955 · Lypovets, Yavoriv Raion, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine
Ihor Havryshkevych is a Lviv painter, People's Artist of Ukraine, and for fifteen years the director of the Lychakiv Cemetery museum-reserve. His painting builds stylised figures and open, unmixed colour into large historical cycles — 'Along the Paths of Taras Shevchenko', 'Ancestors' and 'Along Cossack Trails' — that came out of his journeys across Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Ihor Stepanovych Havryshkevych was born on 13 March 1955 in the village of Lypovets in the Yavoriv district of Lviv region, into a large peasant family. He came to painting the long way round: vocational school in Ivano-Frankove, then years as a technical artist and industrial designer, including sixteen years designing for the Yuvelirprom jewellery works. According to the Lviv National Academy of Arts he graduated from the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts in 1983. From 1987 he was an active member of the Lev Society and in 1990 was elected to the first democratic Lviv City Council, serving again in 2002 and 2006. From 1997 to 2012 he directed the Lychakiv Cemetery museum-reserve and co-authored its guidebook. Since 2005 he has taught as an associate professor in the academic painting department of the Lviv National Academy of Arts. His painting is built on stylised imagery and open colour that fuse Ukrainian folk-art tradition with contemporary practice; his output runs to hundreds of canvases and more than fifty exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad, organised into the cycles 'Along the Paths of T. Shevchenko', 'Ancestors' and 'Along Cossack Trails'. Among his best-known works are 'Night Radiance on the Shevchenko Bluff', 'Between the San and the Don', 'Travellers' and 'Frescoes of Kholodnyi Yar'. In 2014–2015 he auctioned a group of his own paintings and gave the proceeds to Ukrainian soldiers and to the Lviv monuments to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and to Mykhailo Verbytsky, composer of the national anthem. He was made Merited Worker of Arts of Ukraine in 2005, People's Artist of Ukraine in 2019, and received the Mykhailo Derehus Prize in 2022.
Art Movements
Folk Decorative Art
Folk decorative art is the visual language of a community, traditionally created by untrained artisans rather than academic artists. It combines utility with ornament, transforming everyday objects like furniture, textiles, and tools into works of cultural expression.
Explore movement →1991–presentContemporary Ukrainian Painting
Painting made in independent Ukraine, from the 1991 declaration of independence onward. It is pluralist rather than programmatic: plein-air landscape and psychological portraiture continue alongside conceptual, minimalist and symbolist strands, with a marked turn after 2014 and especially after 2022 toward wartime subjects, national memory and the vernacular Ukrainian village.
Explore movement →Works by Ihor Havryshkevych
By the Spring
An early canvas in the flat, folk-derived colour that became the artist's signature, published by the Lviv National Academy of Arts.
Prayer
A figure composition on a devotional theme, published by the Lviv National Academy of Arts among the representative works of its academic painting department.
By the Old Storehouse
A village scene beside an old wooden granary, from the artist's series on ancestral Ukrainian life.
Frescoes of Kholodnyi Yar
One of the artist's best-known canvases, from the historical cycles that grew out of his journeys through Ukraine; Kholodnyi Yar is the forest tract that has stood for Ukrainian insurgency since the Haidamaka risings.