Maksym Polyvianyi
Максим Полив'яний
b. 1999 · Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine
Maksym Polyvianyi (b. 1999, Kharkiv Oblast) is a Ukrainian painter of near-monochrome, minimalist landscapes in acrylic. He paints the Ukrainian village at dusk and at night — a lit window, a stork's nest, fog in a hollow — reducing each scene to a few tonal values.
Maksym Polyvianyi was born on 13 January 1999 in Kharkiv Oblast and grew up in a village, where his grandfather, himself an artist, taught him to paint as a child. He studied at art school from 2014 to 2018 and then at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts from 2018 to 2021. He chose landscape as his genre from the outset, and works in acrylic on canvas in a deliberately restricted, often almost monochrome tonal range: what he seeks is not the external appearance of nature but the way it resonates as memory and feeling. His characteristic subjects are the Ukrainian countryside after dark — a single lit window in a thatched house, a night sky over a farmstead, mist lying in a hollow, geese in low sun, a Cossack riding across the steppe. After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 he was forced to leave Kharkiv for western Ukraine, where he continues to work. He has been presented by the Kharkiv Art Museum in its 'The museum opens new names' series, sells directly through his own website and Instagram, and his paintings are in private collections in the USA, Germany, Canada, Austria, England and Ukraine.
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Art Movements
Romanticism
Romanticism—an ideological and artistic movement in European and American culture from the late 18th century to the first half of the 19th century—is characterized by the affirmation of the intrinsic value of the individual’s spiritual and creative life, the depiction of intense (often rebellious) passions and characters, and the portrayal of nature as inspiring and healing. It spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, anything strange, picturesque, and existing in books rather than in reality was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, Romanticism became the name for a new movement, opposed to Classicism and the Enlightenment.
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 Maksym Polyvianyi
Free
A tall vertical landscape painted in 2023, the title reading as a statement about the land itself.
Cossack Across the Steppe
A lone rider crossing open steppe, reduced to a silhouette against a broad tonal sky — the artist's one recurring historical motif.
Ukrainian Night
A village at night reduced to a few dark tonal masses and one warm lit window, the core image of the artist's night series.
By the Old Mill
A wooden windmill standing in flat evening light, painted in the artist's characteristic near-monochrome register.
May Night
The artist's largest night landscape to date, a spring village under moonlight worked across a wide horizontal canvas.