While almost all galleries are packed with modern Ukrainian art, M17 contemporary art center has put on a display a movement that influenced much of it – Italy’s transavantgarde.
This movement of Italian artists – proponents of a style that literally means “beyond the avant-garde” – introduced emotion back into modern art. It rose to prominence in the 1980s, just around the time when dissident Ukrainian artists were looking to break free from strict Soviet artistic policy.
Works by Sandro Chia, Enzo Kukk,Nicola De Maria, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino presented at the opening on April 15 are taken from the original show at the Venice Biennale in 1980 that influenced Ukrainian “New Wave” artists such as Arsen Savadov and Vasyl Tsagolov.
A guest at the opening of the exhibition on April 20. (m17.com.ua)
The exhibition was opened by art critic Akile Bonito Oliva, the father of the movement who curated the Biennale show. It features a huge variety of oil paintings from a triangle and rectangle diptych painted in red and blue to colorful pictures in large vintage engraved wooden and steel frames that look like Russian icons.
The Italian artists aimed to break away from art as a commercial, political or historical project. Instead, they wanted to infuse it with feelings, combining methods from sculpture, graphic art and collage to enrich their paintings.
“Transavantgarde declared art not influenced by politics or history, based on expressiveness and not on profit,” said Vieri Sorace-Mareska, the head of Italian Institute of Culture in Kyiv.
Among featured artists, Sandro Chia uses bold and sharp lines and bright colorful scheme that make his paintings attractive and expressive. Some of his works contain features of Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings, for example, the untitled portrait of a person sitting on a chair near a table with a bottle on it, where each image seems to be made of different geometric forms.
Oleksiy Tytarenko, curator of M17 contemporary art center, pointed out two paintings by Mimmo Paladino “Angel” and “Untitled (Gold background)” as characteristic of the movement’s strong, lively images. The former shows an angel inside a dove-like bird’s head drawn in profile; the latter depicts a black angel on a gold background with white ellipse-shaped spot on his breast.
Paladino follows antique Russian iconographic traditions in his works, and one of them, “The Heart of Russia,” is dedicated to the country. It looks like an old icon with a large wooden frame, depicting a sad red face on top of a white one with three Cyrillic letters made of twigs tacked to the picture.
The whole exhibition brings together different reflections on modern world, and each image no matter abstract or formalistic possesses a great inner background, not historical or political, but based on the artist’s fantasy and feelings.
“The main aim of the exhibition is to show how deeply Italian transavantgarde art influenced Ukrainian modern art in early ‘80s and make the contemporary art get rid of the Anglo-Saxon model of profit,” said Sorace-Mareska.
The follow-up to the exhibition will be a show in Italy presenting works of Ukrainian New Wave artists along with the Italian transavantgardists’ paintings.
| M17 Contemporary art center, 102-104 Gorkogo St., metro Palats Ukraina, www.m17.com.ua, until June 15. |
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