Expressionism
Експресіонізм
A modernist approach that distorts colour, drawing and surface to convey inner emotional and spiritual states rather than optical appearances. In Ukrainian art it runs from the early-twentieth-century Galician and Lviv painters through to post-war diaspora artists, who combined heavy impasto, near-abstract structural drawing and saturated non-naturalistic colour.
Artists of the Movement
Adalbert Erdeli
1891–1955
Adalbert Erdeli (1891–1955) was a founder of the Transcarpathian school of painting, trained in Budapest, Munich and Paris, where he absorbed impressionism and fauvism. With Yosyp Bokshai he founded the Uzhhorod art school in 1927 and taught most of the region's leading painters, refusing socialist realism throughout the Soviet period.
Liuboslav Hutsaliuk
1923–2003
Liuboslav Hutsaliuk was a Lviv-born painter who emigrated to New York in 1949 and became one of the leading figures of Ukrainian diaspora modernism. Working between studios in New York and Paris, he built a distinctive body of cityscapes in which cathedral spires, rooftops and bridges dissolve into thick vertical impasto and two- or three-note colour harmonies.
Alla Horska
1929–1970
Alla Horska (1929–1970) was a Ukrainian painter and monumentalist, and with her husband Viktor Zaretskyi a founder of the Club of Creative Youth "Suchasnyk" and a central figure of the Sixtiers and the dissident movement. Her output spans easel painting and portrait drawing, banned stage designs for Les Taniuk, and large mosaic and stained-glass cycles. She was murdered in Vasylkiv in November 1970 at the age of 41, and much of her monumental work has since been destroyed or is endangered.
Anatolii Kryvolap
b. 1946
Anatolii Kryvolap, born 1946 in Yahotyn, is the master of Ukrainian non-figurative landscape and one of the highest-selling living Ukrainian painters. Colour is his entire subject — steppe, lake, evening, horse reduced to saturated fields of pigment — and in 2011 his canvases twice set world records for contemporary Ukrainian art at Phillips.
Works from this Movement
Portrait of the Artist's Father
Adalbert Erdeli
A portrait of Mykhailo Hryts, the artist's Ukrainian father — the man who Magyarised the family name — painted in 1926, the year Erdeli settled in Uzhhorod.
Old Town
Liuboslav Hutsaliuk
A dense old-European townscape of gabled roofs, arcades and pointed spires reduced to a lattice of olive, ochre and coral impasto against a flat yellow sky. Signed and dated lower right 'Hutsaliuk 1959', it is a fully characteristic example of the 'gothicised' city pictures that made his reputation in Paris.
Boats
Liuboslav Hutsaliuk
A small, heavily worked panel of moored boats, showing how Hutsaliuk carried the same vertical impasto and narrow colour range from his large city canvases into intimate formats.
Windfall
Roman Selskyi
A Carpathian forest floor of storm-thrown spruce, the shattered trunks flattened into pale calligraphic shapes against a dense dark green ground worked in heavy impasto. Bought by the gallery directly from Selskyi in 1980.
Evening. Steppe
Anatolii Kryvolap
A square steppe landscape from the Meditative Landscape series, where the horizon becomes a single hot band of colour between earth and sky.
Carpathian Night
Anatolii Kryvolap
From the Carpathians series begun in 2000, part of the 'Ukrainian Motif' cycle: mountain ridges compressed into flat, deep bands of night colour.
Horse. Night
Anatolii Kryvolap
From the Horse series begun in 2005, in which the animal is reduced to a silhouette floating in a field of saturated night colour. A canvas of this title sold at Phillips de Pury in London in October 2011 for about $124,000, then a world record for contemporary Ukrainian art.
Mirror of Ukraine
Anatolii Kryvolap
From the Evening series in the 'Ukrainian Motif' cycle: still water holding the whole of a Ukrainian dusk, painted the year after the Shevchenko Prize.