Lviv Colourism

Львівський колоризм

A distinct post-war Lviv painting school, founded and led by Roman Selskyi, in which colour relationships rather than narrative or drawing carry the picture. Rooted in the interwar Parisian and 'Artes' experience of its founders, it kept a modernist, non-narrative practice alive in Western Ukraine through the Soviet decades and shaped several generations of Lviv painters.

Artists of the Movement

Roman Selskyi

1903–1990

Roman Selskyi was the central figure of twentieth-century Lviv painting and the founder of the school known as Ukrainian colourism, in which colour rather than subject carries the picture. Trained in Kraków and Paris, where he worked at Fernand Léger's Académie Moderne, he brought European modernism back to Galicia and first chaired the avant-garde group 'Artes'. As a professor in Lviv from 1947 he taught for nearly thirty years and shaped a generation of painters who kept a non-doctrinal practice alive in Soviet Ukraine.

Works from this Movement

1968

Windfall

Roman Selskyi

A Carpathian forest floor of storm-thrown spruce, the shattered trunks flattened into pale calligraphic shapes against a dense dark green ground worked in heavy impasto. Bought by the gallery directly from Selskyi in 1980.

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1980

Houses in Chornohora

Roman Selskyi

Highland houses in the Chornohora range, from the Carpathian series Selskyi worked on for three decades, reduced to blocks of colour and roofline. Shown repeatedly in NU ART's Selskyi retrospectives, including 'Roman Selskyi. Modernism and Magic' (2018) and his 120th-anniversary exhibition (2023).

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1981

Crimean Window

Roman Selskyi

A window motif that fuses still life and landscape: a spotted jug, a bowl of grapes and a straw hat on a table in front of an open frame giving onto tiled roofs, a rooster, cypresses and a pink Crimean mountain. Donated to the gallery by Selskyi himself in 1984.

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Still Life with a Palette

Roman Selskyi

A studio still life built around the painter's own palette, the tool turned into subject, worked in the thick, tactile impasto and deliberately weighed colour relationships of Selskyi's mature manner. Signed lower right; catalogued by the Goldens auction house as 1970s rather than a single year.

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