Ilona Shymchyts

Ilona Vitaliivna Shymchyts comes from the village of Mushkativka in the Borshchiv district of Ternopil Oblast and was educated at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, where her painting-department diploma projects were the exhibition project «Вихід. Буття.» (Exit. Being.) and the painting-and-installation «Сад» (Garden), the latter addressing the depiction of war in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. She lives and works in Lviv. Her practice divides into two strands. The first is a conceptual, minimalist abstraction on paper — works such as "Spectrum" (2018), built from twelve coloured triangles and a scatter of circles read as reflections of a single circle, and "Spiritus oceanum" (2021), acrylic on paper finished with matte varnish. She has also made relief sculpture, beginning the "Labyrinths" series in 2020 from wooden blocks of differing heights with filigree carving and acrylic paint. The second strand, dominant in her recent output, is landscape: small and mid-size acrylics on canvas of fields, cattle, snow-covered roofs and abandoned village houses, combining a realist attention to detail with a soft decorative quality and a deliberately restrained palette. Her work has been exhibited in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Borshchiv, at the L. Levytskyi Museum in Burdiakivtsi, and abroad in Toronto, Poznań and Toruń. It is held in private collections in Ukraine, the United States, Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the Czech Republic, and is distributed internationally through Saatchi Art and Artsper.