Ihor Khilko

Ihor Olehovych Khilko was born on 26 May 1969 in Sokyriany, Chernivtsi Oblast, into the family of an architect and a librarian. He trained at the Taras Shevchenko Republican Art School in Kyiv and then on the art-and-graphics faculty of the Vasyl Stefanyk Prykarpattia University in Ivano-Frankivsk (1992–1997), where he twice held the Vasyl Stefanyk personal scholarship. From 2000 he taught at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, defended a doctorate in pedagogy in 2007, and is now an associate professor in its department of construction and architecture. He joined the National Union of Artists of Ukraine in the mid-2000s and has taken part in fourteen all-Ukrainian and six international exhibitions since 1997, with solo shows in Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv and Chernivtsi as well as in Austria, Slovenia, Poland and Romania. Alongside easel painting he has carried out a substantial programme of icon restoration in the Sokyriany and Kelmentsi districts of Chernivtsi Oblast, working on a Deesis, a Christ Pantocrator, Saint Barbara, Saint Nicholas and a Mary Magdalene. His painting subjects are drawn largely from the Carpathians and the Dniester valley — mountain churches, the Cheremosh river, village life and seasonal still lifes — handled with attention to atmosphere and changing light. In May–June 2024 the Chernivtsi Regional Art Museum showed twenty-four of his oil-pastel works under the title «Свій шлях» ("My Own Path"), a body of work he connected to travel in nineteen countries. His first professional commission was the cover of Volodymyr Martyniuk's poetry collection «Мамине сонце» (1993).