Modernism

Oleksa Novakivskyi

1872–1935

Evolved from Impressionism through Symbolism to personal Expressionism; under Sheptytsky's patronage founded an influential Lviv art school (1923).

Vasyl Krychevskyi

1873–1952

Pioneering painter, architect and graphic artist; a founder of Ukrainian Art Nouveau; designed the trident state emblem and banknotes of the UNR (1918); emigrated, died in Venezuela.

Oleksandr Murashko

1875–1919

Often called the most important Ukrainian artist of the turn of the century; trained under Repin and Ažbe; 'Carousel' won gold at Munich 1909; co-founded the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts (1917); murdered in Kyiv 1919.

Fedir Krychevskyi

1879–1947

Leading early-modernist painter; co-founder/rector of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts; created the triptych 'Life' (Venice Biennale 1928); persecuted after WWII, died in poverty 1947.

Ivan Miasoiedov

1881–1953

Ivan Miasoiedov was a painter, draughtsman and engraver born in Kharkiv and raised on his family's estate near Poltava, where he led a bohemian artists' circle and painted Ukrainian landscapes alongside large symbolist compositions on antique myth. He was also a champion weightlifter, a wartime artist, a convicted counterfeiter and, from 1938, the designer of Liechtenstein's postage stamps under the name Eugen Zotow. His early Poltava-period work is held by the Poltava Art Museum, and the bulk of his later output by the Zotow–Miasoiedov Foundation in Vaduz.

Adalbert Erdeli

1891–1955

Adalbert Erdeli (1891–1955) was a founder of the Transcarpathian school of painting, trained in Budapest, Munich and Paris, where he absorbed impressionism and fauvism. With Yosyp Bokshai he founded the Uzhhorod art school in 1927 and taught most of the region's leading painters, refusing socialist realism throughout the Soviet period.

Vsevolod Maksymovych

1894–1914

Short-lived Poltava prodigy ('the Ukrainian Beardsley'); ornate Symbolist/Art Nouveau paintings; most surviving works in the National Art Museum of Ukraine.

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.

Liuboslav Hutsaliuk

1923–2003

Liuboslav Hutsaliuk was a Lviv-born painter who emigrated to New York in 1949 and became one of the leading figures of Ukrainian diaspora modernism. Working between studios in New York and Paris, he built a distinctive body of cityscapes in which cathedral spires, rooftops and bridges dissolve into thick vertical impasto and two- or three-note colour harmonies.

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.

Yurii Khymych

1928–2003

Yurii Khymych was a Ukrainian architect turned painter, the outstanding master of the architectural landscape in twentieth-century Ukrainian art. By the late 1950s he was regarded as one of the finest watercolourists in the USSR, before abruptly switching to gouache, the medium of most of his mature work. Trained as an architect and steeped in years of copying church frescoes and mosaics, he painted what he called 'portraits of buildings' — flattened, open-coloured, black-contoured images closer to icons than to conventional views.

Oleksandr Dubovyk

b. 1931

Oleksandr Dubovyk is a Ukrainian painter, printmaker, monumental artist and writer on art, born in Kyiv in 1931 and still working there. A leading figure of the Kyiv artistic underground of the 1960s–80s, he moved from academic training through the austere realism of the Thaw into an abstract-symbolist language of his own signs — the Bouquet, the Triumphator, the Phantom, the Tree of Life. His work is held by the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Zimmerli Art Museum's Dodge Collection and museums in Germany, Iran and the USA.

Yurii Vatkin

b. 1975

Yurii Vatkin is a Kharkiv-based abstract painter who moved from realism through expressionism to a colour-driven abstraction rooted in nature. He works in thick, visually tactile impasto strokes, treating each canvas as a record of his emotional state at the moment of painting. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2008, he has exhibited in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Prague, London, Milan, Luxembourg, Glasgow and New York.

Ilona Shymchyts

Ilona Shymchyts is a Ukrainian painter and relief-carver from the Borshchiv district of Ternopil Oblast, trained at the Lviv National Academy of Arts and based in Lviv. Her work moves between geometric abstraction in acrylic on paper and quiet, meditative rural landscapes in which village architecture carries a sense of calm and rootedness. She has shown in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Borshchiv as well as in Canada and Poland.