Yurii Lesiuk

Yurii Petrovych Lesiuk was born on 1 May 1947 in the village of Kovalivka, then in the Yabluniv district of the Stanislav region and now in the Kolomyia district of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. He graduated from the Mykola Hrekov Odesa State Art School in 1968 and from the Kyiv State Art Institute in 1972, where his teachers included Vasyl Hurin, Anatolii Plamenytskyi and Ivan Tykhyi. He has worked at the Lviv College of Decorative and Applied Arts ever since, heading its painting board from 1988, and joined the National Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1988. He has shown in more than ninety Ukrainian, all-Union and international exhibitions since the late 1980s, with solo exhibitions in Lviv (1988, 1997, 2007, 2012), Regina and Saskatoon in Canada (1998), Kyiv (2000–01), Toronto (2001), New York (2002), Kolomyia (2010) and Ivano-Frankivsk (2011). Lesiuk paints thematic pictures, landscapes, still lifes and portraits; critics describe his work as a dialogue between the artist's inner world and the harmony of his surroundings, expressed in a modern idiom that synthesises the flattened decorative treatment of folk culture with impressionism, and shot through with folk humour. Easter and other ritual subjects recur across his output — «Писанки. Мати» (1979), «Славайсу» (1996), «До храму» (1991), «Як писанка село» (2004), «Великодня ніч» (2006) — alongside an extensive Shevchenkiana. He published an autobiographical essay, «Аромат червоних йон» (Ivano-Frankivsk, 2010). His paintings are held by the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, the Lviv Art Gallery, the Taras Shevchenko National Museum and the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Borshchiv Local History Museum, the National Museum of Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttia in Kolomyia, and the Ukrainian Museum of Art in Saskatoon, Canada. He was named Honoured Artist of Ukraine in 2009.