Three years ago a work by Ukrainian artist Roman Minin entitled “Plan for Escape from Donetsk Oblast” caused a stir among art connoisseurs and brought him fame in Ukraine and abroad.
The picture looks like a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral, and consists of a series of small paintings that depict scenes from miners’ lives in the Donbas, Ukraine’s slag heap-dotted, run-down coal basin.
In fact, all of Minin’s works are dedicated to miners. “This is the topic I know the best, because I know about miners’ lives from my own life, not from libraries or museums,” he says.
Minin, 35, was born in the small town of Myrnohrad, formerly known as Dymytrov, 60 kilometers west of Donetsk. All his relatives – parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts – were coal miners. Life in the city revolved around coal mining, he says.
“There were no educational institutions in Dymytrov apart from several vocational schools that trained future miners. People there worked either as miners or as service staff for miners – doctors, cooks, police officers,” the artist recalls.
Minin’s work is in growing demand from modern art lovers, gallery owners and art collectors around the globe. Over the past four years his works have been regularly sold at Sotheby’s and Philips auction houses. Last year Minin’s work “Generator of the Donetsk Subway” was sold at the Sotheby’s fine arts auction for a record $11,498.
It was his professor Viktor Hontarov from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts who strongly recommended that he start painting coal miners. “I immediately understood that miners are my topic. I really like the idea of inventing such an archetype that would become an out-of-time symbol,” Minin told the Kyiv Post at an interview in a Kyiv art gallery during the first Ukrainian Art Week, a set of exhibitions and sales, during which he presented his latest works.
It soon it became clear to Minin that the topic would help him reassess his personal life story.
Minin paints miners with brutal honesty – frequently they are depicted as untidy, stocky men who like to drink and smoke. His works are a striking mix of social realism and Christian iconography. “Miners in the Donbas region live in a society that tries to equalize everybody. Even people who are not predisposed to all these things start smoking and drinking, just so as not to stand out from the masses,” Minin says, adding that at the same time miners are bearers of spiritual values – which is why their images are interwoven with Christian iconography.
Historically, the Donbas had closer economic and cultural ties to Russia than to Europe, and “hardly any Donbas dweller visited other Ukrainian regions, because the whole system was not interested in the popularization of Ukraine,” Minin says.
Now he is concerned about the region’s future. After the start of the war with pro-Russian separatists in the east of Ukraine, the local authorities still don’t have any plans about how to reintegrate the region.
“I’m afraid that when the war ends people who supported pro-Russian separatists might take revenge on those who supported pro-Ukrainian forces, and vice versa,” he adds.
Minin’s work still remains misunderstood in his native Donbas. In 2007, his exhibition “Miners’ folklore” in Donetsk was removed because then-Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko didn’t like the picture “To Mine Face or to Drink” featuring working and drunken miners. Some of the pictures were even thrown out onto the streets during the exhibition. Later, Minin tried to organize a private art exhibition in Donetsk, but once again was unable to do so.
This doesn’t seem to bother him now. The artist believes that the people of the Donbas are still not ready to accept his art. “There will be a time when my art will be understood at last, that’s why I continue to do what I do,” he says.
Minin plans to continue creating artworks dedicated to miners for his whole life. “There will be time when my works become the property of the nation, and the miner’s theme will go down in history, along with me,” he says.
