Many avant-garde artists play with images of human vice. Refusing to graze off the well-combed art fields, they prowl underground to find the seamy side of life.Ukraine provides plenty of silage for such free-thinkers: politics, sexism, cultural and economic disparity.
Serhiy Kolyada
The Union of Free Artists “Freedom or Death” collects Ukraine’s tailings and throws them against the background of the familiar Ukrainian scenery. Semi-nude Ukrainian women, blood-sucking Ukrainian politicians, drunken miners and tasteless nouveau-riches take center stage in their paintings and prints. Some say they go for sensation and shock. Others see it as social commentary, a mirror reflection of the daily grind.
“We show some dirty stuff in order to stir loathing in you. It’s hard but necessary,” said Serhiy Kolyada, lead artist of the “Freedom or Death.”
Kolyada has been working underground for a dozen of years capturing life through ink drawings.
He would juxtapose a well-known brand of vodka and a voluptuous Ukrainian woman in front of a Kyiv church obliterating norms and boundaries. He juggles with famous classical paintings and sculptures, like Mona Lisa or David, fusing them into creepy Ukraine environs.
Controversy and denial are his daily companions.
As an example, he recounts an episode with former first lady, Kateryna Yushchenko, during an exhibition where some of his works were displayed. “She asked if we really hate Ukraine that much. I said it was not about hatred. We just wanted to show the truth,” said Kolyada.
His truth, however, surpasses rolling green hills and sunflower fields. In the latest project “The Big Circular Road,” he reflects on sex tourism in Ukraine. The name comes from the Circular Road (Kiltseva Doroha) area on the Kyiv outskirts known as a prostitution market.
Kolyada thinks the infamous road is taking over Ukraine. “Prostitution in Ukraine is more latent than say in Thailand. But with [the European Football Championship] Euro 2012 drawing closer, it’s becoming more obvious, and we have to face it.”
His works are ample fields for censors of all types. His art has been labeled as pornography, violence, libel – you name it. One would hardly let children near the collection. Ironically, Kolyada – always the revolutionist at heart – studied to be a teacher but was excluded from university for taking part in anti-communist demonstrations.
“It’s always been difficult. I was beaten up for wearing long hair at school, and now I take the beating for my art,” said Kolyada.
Surviving the criticism and censorship is a part of the job for Kolyada and his fellow artists.
Roman Minin’s work “Working or a drinking bout?” about the highs and lows of being a coal miner in Ukraine was taken down from the exhibition in Donetsk. Ivan Semesyuk’s portrait of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno “Freedom or f… them all” was removed when former President Victor Yushchenko decided to check out one of the exhibitions in the Painters’ House in Kyiv.
Kolyada was about to give up a few times trying to immigrate to Sweden and then Canada in 1990’s. With his applications denied, the artist stayed on and was finally lifted out of the obscurity by actor and showman Antin Mukharsky.
Mukharsky founded the union of five and provided the much-needed protection. The showman himself collects Ukrainian folk paintings conceived by unknown rural artists between 1930’s and 1960’s. Bright – at times gaudy – scenes of barefoot women, forest palaces and pink churches, fed the imagination of villagers.
This philistine art deserved no place among socialist renditions of happy pioneers and brave military then. “These ideal and mythical paintings helped people escape the mundane, and sometimes starving, reality,” said Mukharsky.
“Aren’t these works a prototype of the modern world when gloss and glam rules the crumbling agrarian country?”
Mukharsky, however, is a part of this world. People started recognizing him on the street when he played in a detergent commercial in 2003. As Mr Tide, he would say “Aren’t you wearing white yet? Then, we are on our way to get you.”
Now, Mukharsky has quit the cheesy ads and is supporting the simmering radical artists. Their work costs between $300 and a few thousand dollars. The more difficult part is thinking of a place where to hang this raw avant-garde rendition.
Kolyada said he couldn’t convince his spouse to decorate their home with his work. Perhaps you could.
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Kyiv Post Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].
