In the Bose Hall of the Art Museum "Riga Stock Exchange" (Riga, Domskaya Square, 6), a personal exhibition of the living classic of Ukrainian fine art Ivan Marchuk "Interrupted Dialogue" has opened.
A brief review of the exhibition was conducted by its curator Vita Birzaka, who also spoke about the artist himself. As she said, now ten works by Marchuk are presented, for the first time in the Baltics, the exhibition is held in collaboration with the director of Galerie Les Noms Yuriy Gutsu, who owns the work.
“Marchuk has been working hard all his life and continues to do so now,” Ms. Birzaka said. He has his own way of being creative. Marchuk does not identify himself with any genre, he paints plots similar to fairy tales, fantastic figures, but there are also hyper-realistic portraits and magical compositions.
The initiator of this exhibition was Maria Volina, who has been living in Latvia almost since the beginning of the war, an artist and public figure, now the curator of the current project and a representative of the aforementioned Ukrainian gallery in Latvia.
“At this difficult time, Latvia is providing tremendous assistance to Ukraine, my native state,” Maria said in Latvian, without a piece of paper. - Our peoples are together in achieving humanity and humanism in the world. All the people of Ukraine are grateful to Latvia for their support. Our gallery offers the works of the best Ukrainian artist to express our gratitude.”
According to Maria, Ivan Marchuk worked intensively to create an individual painting style and eventually created a kind of artistic expressiveness, which he calls pliontanism (from Ukrainian pliontati - "weave, braid, connect"). Instead of the usual strokes, he seems to follow the thread and weave a lacy net on canvas or cardboard.
“If I were asked now what is the highest form of cooperation between museums, I would say that this is not only scientific work, conferences, this is an opportunity to love each other and help each other,” said Daiga Upeniece, director of the Riga Stock Exchange, opening the exhibition. - And here I mean colleagues not only from the Odessa Museum, the Kyiv Restoration Center, but also the Kherson Museum, with which we became great friends. This exhibition is small, but this is our gift, this is our desire to be together with Ukraine.”
In turn, in his speech, the Minister of Culture of Latvia Nauris Puntulis noted that in the very first days after the start of the criminal war in Russia, Latvian musicians held actions in support of Ukraine, and a week ago, participants in the song festival movement collected four tons of trench candles.
“Today we are opening an exhibition of Ivan Marchuk and will continue to support Ukraine with our spirit until complete victory,” the minister said.
“The whole world is now delighted with the Ukrainian army and asks where the strength of the Ukrainian people comes from? - Oleksandr Mishchenko, Ambassador of Ukraine to Latvia, said in his speech. - The roots of this force are in the works of Ivan Marchuk and in the music of the composer Valentin Silvestrov... Ivan Marchuk always fought for Ukrainian culture, for Ukrainian traditions, he was persecuted during the totalitarian regime, which was against freedom and democracy. And now the Ukrainian people will never be mastered by a nation with a totalitarian mindset...”
Ivan Marchuk was born in 1936 in Moskalivka, Ternopil region, Ukraine. He studied at the Ivan Trash School of Applied Arts in Lviv and at the Institute of Applied Arts there. During the Soviet period of his creative activity, Marchuk was under the constant control of the State Security Committee, until 1988. He was not admitted to the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR as a representative of underground art, although already in those years he had more than fifteen exhibitions in different cities of the then Soviet Union. In 1989 Ivan emigrated to Australia and later moved to Canada and the USA. In 2001, after the September 11 attacks in New York, he returned to Ukraine.
Now he has more than 150 solo exhibitions in Ukraine and other countries of the world. He was awarded the honorary title of People's Artist of Ukraine and laureate of the Shevchenko State Prize. In 2006, he became a member of the "Golden Guild" of the International Academy of Contemporary Art in Rome, numbering 51 artists from all over the world, and was elected an honorary member of its Academic Council.
The exhibition has been extended until April 2, 2023.