Oleksii Fishchenko

Oleksii Fedorovych Fishchenko was born on 29 December 1920 in Uman and died on 15 February 2010 in Kyiv. He trained late, graduating from the Hrekov Art College in Odesa in 1953 and then from the Kyiv State Art Institute in 1959, where he studied easel graphics in the studio of Oleksandr Pashchenko. He joined the Union of Artists in 1960 and remained a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine for the rest of his life. Fishchenko worked across colour linocut, pencil drawing, watercolour and pastel, and also painted and illustrated books, but his reputation rests on the linocut: he cut each colour on a separate board and pulled his impressions by hand rather than on a press, building up saturated, layered surfaces that read almost as paintings. His landscape cycles include «Канів» (1957–59), «Тарасова земля», «Моя Батьківщина» (1961) and «Карпати» (1961–70), and individual sheets such as «Звучання полів» (1967), «Тиша сторожа» (1969), «Бархат гір» (1969) and «Весняний день» (1970). From the 1980s he concentrated on the city in the cycle «Ритми. Київ», a body of decoratively structured Kyiv views in which architecture is reduced to interlocking planes of colour; sheets from it are dated from 1988 into the 1990s. He also made portraits, among them Taras Shevchenko (1982), the sculptor Vasyl Borodai (1994), a self-portrait (1997) and Mykola Khvyliovyi (2001). He was named an Honoured Art Worker of the Ukrainian SSR in 1969 and a People's Artist of Ukraine in 2000. His prints are held by the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum and other Ukrainian collections, and the Kyiv Art Gallery has shown his cityscapes.