Optical Illusion Art
Мистецтво оптичної ілюзії
Art built on ambiguous or double images, where a single painted surface reads as two different subjects depending on how the eye organises it. Rooted in the 16th-century composite heads of Arcimboldo and continued by Dalí's paranoiac-critical images and Escher's impossible figures; in Ukraine its best-known exponent is Oleh Shupliak, who calls his double-image canvases 'dvovzory'.
Artists of the Movement
Oleh Shupliak
b. 1967
Oleh Shupliak (b. 1967, Bishche, Ternopil Oblast) is an Honoured Artist of Ukraine best known for his 'dvovzory' — double-image paintings in which a landscape or genre scene resolves, at a second glance, into a portrait. He has been called the Ukrainian Salvador Dalí.
Mariia Holub
b. 1990
Mariia Holub is a Ukrainian painter based in Cherkasy, born in 1990, who studied painting, graphics and design at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. She paints in acrylic on canvas, combining magical realism with op-art and pixel-like patterning in vivid, near-fluorescent colour. The Cherkasy Regional Art Museum gave her a solo exhibition, «Мереживо нескінченності» (Lace of Infinity), in 2022.
Works from this Movement
The Moon Rose over the Dnipro
Ivan Marchuk
A moonlit nocturne over the Dnipro, Marchuk's largest treatment of a moonlit night, in which the whole surface is spun from fine looping filaments of paint. In June 2024 it set an auction record for a contemporary Ukrainian artist at the Goldens house in Kyiv.
I was thirteen
Oleh Shupliak
A boy pasturing lambs outside a village, after the opening lines of Shevchenko's poem; the pastoral scene simultaneously forms the poet's own face. One of Shupliak's most reproduced dvovzory.
Double portrait of Van Gogh
Oleh Shupliak
A Provençal landscape in Van Gogh's own manner that simultaneously reads as the Dutch painter's head and shoulders.
Forest Song. Lesya Ukrainka
Oleh Shupliak
A woodland scene from Lesya Ukrainka's drama 'The Forest Song' that resolves into the writer's portrait.
Wide Dnipr roars and groans!
Oleh Shupliak
A storm over the Dnipro, taking its title from Shevchenko's ballad 'Prychynna', in which the churning river and clouds compose a hidden face.
Digital Cottage
Mariia Holub
A traditional Ukrainian whitewashed cottage rebuilt out of pixel-like cells and glittering ornament, collapsing folk architecture into a digital surface. It is the clearest statement of Holub's move between village iconography and screen aesthetics.
Evil must die!
Oleh Shupliak
An allegory of evil built from destroyed Russian military vehicles bearing the 'Z', inverted 'V' and 'O' invasion markings, painted on 5 April 2022. The artist released it himself under a free licence.
Scarce Swallowtail
Mariia Holub
A scarce swallowtail butterfly rendered as a field of interlocking patterned cells in high-keyed colour. The insect's wings become a pretext for the lacework structure that gave the exhibition its title.
Lineage
Mariia Holub
A painting about descent and family memory, organised as a branching ornamental structure in the manner of a genealogical tree. It belongs to the group of works in which Holub treats pattern itself as a carrier of inherited meaning.