Yurii Khymych

Yurii Ivanovych Khymych was born on 12 April 1928 in Kamianets-Podilskyi, the son of a sugar-factory chemical engineer and a schoolteacher. At seventeen he showed his watercolours to the academician Oleksii Shovkunenko, who advised him to enter the architecture faculty of the Kyiv Civil Engineering Institute, where he studied from 1945 to 1950 under the painter and watercolourist Mykhailo Shteinberg. After army service in Sevastopol from 1950 to 1954 — during which his first solo exhibition in 1952 drew praise from Tetiana Yablonska and Mykhailo Derehus — he was invited into the Academy of Architecture of the UkrSSR by its president Volodymyr Zabolotny, working there as a researcher and postgraduate and then, from 1957 to 1964, as senior artist in the history of Ukrainian art department. That post set him to recording the interiors of historic buildings and copying monumental church paintings, and Hryhorii Lohvyn observed that his technically immaculate 'copies' were always interpretations rather than transcriptions. Having reached the summit of watercolour technique in 1957–1958, when experts counted him among the best watercolourists in the Soviet Union, he unexpectedly turned to gouache, which he handled so virtuosically — often on the backs of drawings or on the cheapest paper — that it reads as more painterly than oil, and which proved remarkably durable as the pigment sank into the porous stock. He taught at the Kyiv Civil Engineering Institute from 1964 to 1985, becoming a docent and then acting professor of drawing and painting, and from 1984 at the Kyiv State Art Institute, now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, where he was made professor in 1991 and wrote his own methodology for teaching drawing to architects. Scholars divide his work into an early watercolour period, a phase of formal experiment in the first half of the 1960s, and a mature period from the mid-1960s of contemplative, symbolic realism; his exposure to icon painting and to the frescoes and mosaics of Saint Sophia in Kyiv and the wooden Church of the Holy Spirit at Potelych gave him the symbolic generalisation and the black outlines that define his mature style. A member of the National Union of Architects from 1955 and of the National Union of Artists from 1962, and an Honoured Artist and Honoured Architect of Ukraine, he held solo exhibitions across Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Hungary, Finland and the United States; his triptych 'Independence Day' hangs in the United States Capitol, and his work is held by the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of the History of Kyiv. He died in Kyiv on 23 July 2003. Ukrposhta reproduced two of his paintings on postage stamps in 2005 as part of the 'Kyiv through Artists' Eyes' series.