About the Artist
Nataliia Verhun
1938–2026
Nataliia Verhun was a Ukrainian painter based in Kharkiv, People's Artist of Ukraine (1997) and the daughter of the poet Ivan Vyrhan. Trained at the Repin Institute in Leningrad under Andrei Mylnikov, she devoted her career to the life of the Ukrainian village — harvests, field meals, self-portraits and seasonal still lifes. The Kharkiv Art Museum holds the largest body of her work, enlarged by a gift of some 400 pieces in 2025.
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Realism
Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism.
In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century.
One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism.
In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.
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