Folk Decorative Art

Ivan Yizhakevych

1864–1962

One of the most prolific Ukrainian painters and illustrators of his era, trained in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra icon workshop and the St. Petersburg Academy. A late master of Ukrainian icon painting, known for genre scenes and Shevchenko illustrations.

Osyp Kurylas

1870–1951

A Ukrainian (Galician) painter and graphic artist, Kraków Academy-trained, best known for depictions of Hutsuls and patriotic imagery of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, with whom he served in WWI. He later directed Novakivskyi's Lviv art school.

Kateryna Bilokur

1900–1961

Kateryna Bilokur was a self-taught peasant painter from the Poltava region who became one of the great figures of Ukrainian folk decorative art, working almost entirely in oil on canvas without ever attending an art school. Refused entry to art colleges twice for lacking a school certificate, she painted in secret against her family's opposition, making her own brushes from cat and cow hair and cherry twigs. Her densely worked flower compositions on deep blue grounds brought her national recognition from 1940 onwards and are now the core of the collection of the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art in Kyiv.

Mariia Prymachenko

1909–1997

Mariia Prymachenko was a Ukrainian folk painter and the best-known figure of twentieth-century Ukrainian naive art. Working in gouache and watercolour on paper, she invented a bestiary of fantastical animals and personified flowers that has become a national visual emblem. She spent almost her whole life in her native village of Bolotnia, north of Kyiv.

Veniamin Kushnir

1926–1992

Veniamin Kushnir was a Ukrainian painter and monumentalist, and one of the founders of the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth 'Suchasnyk' that gave the Sixtiers movement its centre. He fused Carpathian and Podillian folk form with modernist colour in paintings of motherhood, horses, musicians and Hutsul landscape, and was pushed to the margins of official art for his Ukrainian national convictions.

Polina Raiko

1928–2004

Polina Raiko was a Ukrainian self-taught naive artist from Oleshky in the Kherson region who began to paint at the age of sixty-nine. Over roughly six years she covered the walls and ceilings of her own six-room house, its summer kitchen, gates and fences with enamel-paint murals of angels, birds, animals and family memories. The house became a cult site of Ukrainian outsider art and was destroyed in June 2023 by the flooding that followed the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

Alla Horska

1929–1970

Alla Horska (1929–1970) was a Ukrainian painter and monumentalist, and with her husband Viktor Zaretskyi a founder of the Club of Creative Youth "Suchasnyk" and a central figure of the Sixtiers and the dissident movement. Her output spans easel painting and portrait drawing, banned stage designs for Les Taniuk, and large mosaic and stained-glass cycles. She was murdered in Vasylkiv in November 1970 at the age of 41, and much of her monumental work has since been destroyed or is endangered.

Liubov Panchenko

1938–2022

Liubov Panchenko (1938–2022) was a Ukrainian artist and fashion designer of the Sixtiers generation who worked across clothing design, textile appliqué, embroidery, watercolour, gouache and linocut, always through a Ukrainian ornamental idiom. Blacklisted by the Soviet authorities, she was never admitted to the Union of Artists and neither exhibited nor published for decades. She spent a month under Russian occupation in Bucha in 2022 and died on 30 April that year, aged 84, after starvation and exhaustion.

Viktor Nakonechnyi

1947–2015

Viktor Nakonechnyi was a self-taught Podillian painter, graphic artist and master of vytynanka paper-cutting and pysanka egg-painting from the embroidery village of Klembivka in Vinnytsia Oblast. He fused Ukrainian folk painting traditions with academic oil and tempera technique to build an enormous body of ethnographic village scenes, and won Ukraine's highest artistic honour, the Shevchenko National Prize, in 2009.

Yurii Lesiuk

b. 1947

Yurii Lesiuk is a Lviv painter, Honoured Artist of Ukraine, and head of the painting department at the Ivan Trush Lviv State College of Decorative and Applied Arts. His thematic canvases, landscapes, still lifes and portraits are emphatically national in character, mixing Hutsul and Pokuttia ritual and folk humour with a decorative, flattened treatment of form. He has taken part in more than ninety exhibitions and held eleven solo shows in Ukraine, Canada and the USA.

Viktor Hvozdynskyi

b. 1951

Viktor Vyacheslavovych Hvozdynskyi (born 25 February 1951 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi) is a Ukrainian painter, watercolourist and monumental artist who has worked in Rivne since 1975 and has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 1985. He is best known for watercolour and oil landscapes of Volyn, Polissia, the Carpathians and Central Europe, and for stained glass made with his wife Larysa Hvozdynska.

Ihor Havryshkevych

b. 1955

Ihor Havryshkevych is a Lviv painter, People's Artist of Ukraine, and for fifteen years the director of the Lychakiv Cemetery museum-reserve. His painting builds stylised figures and open, unmixed colour into large historical cycles — 'Along the Paths of Taras Shevchenko', 'Ancestors' and 'Along Cossack Trails' — that came out of his journeys across Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Nadiia Poluian-Vnukova

b. 1968

Nadiia Poluian-Vnukova is a Ukrainian painter born in Romny, Sumy Oblast, in 1968 and still living and working there, a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2004. Trained first as a decorative painter and textile designer, she paints minutely detailed, sunlit interiors, still lifes of wild flowers in ceramic jugs, and scenes of Christmas and childhood in her native Romny district.

Anna Yarmoliuk

b. 1977

Anna Yarmoliuk is a Ukrainian self-taught painter born in 1977, reported to live in Kharkiv and to work as a librarian. She paints small naive-art scenes in oil pastel on paper and cardboard — snowy streets, wooded roads, women and children walking with dogs — with a warm, lyrical view of unhurried small-town life.

Kateryna Kosianenko

b. 1978

Kateryna Kosianenko is a Kyiv painter and icon-painter whose figurative work fuses Ukrainian Baroque iconography with Renaissance composition and an impressionist feel for landscape light. Honoured Artist of Ukraine (2019) and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2002, she works almost entirely in themed series. She has held more than 35 solo exhibitions and won first prize in painting at the 100th Salon d'Automne in Paris (2003).

Mykola Yatsurak

Mykola Yatsurak is a Ukrainian painter from Velykyi Kliuchiv in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, now living in Kolomyia, where he teaches at the Yaroslav Pstrak Art School. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, he paints Hutsul village life, weddings and Carpathian landscapes.