20.06.2008 – 20.07.2008
Serhiy Podervianskyi
Painting, graphics
Curator: Lyudmyla Milyayeva
SERHIY PODERVIANSKY
(1916–2006)
PAINTING, GRAPHIC WORKS
20.06.2008–20.07.2008
Inauguration: 20.06 (Friday) at 17:00
Curator: Lyudmyla Milyayeva
People’s Artist of Ukraine, Professor Serhiy Podervianskyi (1916–2006) lived the greater part of his life in Soviet times. However, his creativity was outside the mainstream of art of socialist realism to which he rendered minimal tribute.
Podervianskyi’s works were not time-serving, he took the liberty to devote himself only to that which answered his criteria of the beautiful in his favourite genres – portrait, landscape, still life, and the nudes.
The idiom of his works is extremely laconic and his artistic manner, perfect. He wielded all painting techniques – oil, gouache, tempera, water colour.
He chose personages of his male portraits mostly from people he was well acquainted with: artists, architects, actors, close friends, and students whom he taught at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. Portraits made by the artist are always subjective: in his images he emphasized those characteristic features that attracted him most of all or those he considered basic for his sitters.
However, his proper element was female portrait. He had no favourite type of woman but was attracted by various natures: one of them charmed with her ethnic type, another with extravagance, exoticism, or young grace. He painted his colleagues, members of the family, sometimes unknown women he met in the street, in the underground, at the barber’s, or in a shop…
His portraits, always marked by temperament, demonstrate his excellent artistic skill.
His landscapes show routes of his travellings throughout Ukraine, Russia, the Crimea, the Caucasus, Poland… In them, the artist avoided banal motifs and achieved fine sonority of colours.
Though the artist painted the nude throughout all his life, he did not look forward to exhibit them. His nudes are his creative laboratory through which he extols woman’s beauty employing different techniques of painting and drawing.
Generally, drawing was his alter ego. He always had about himself an album, even under extraordinary circumstances of the Second World War. Albums were his visual diaries. Drawing was an all-sufficient kind of his creative activity in which he worked in the same genres as in painting.
Podervianskyi’s artistic path is refined and at the same time direct and simple. His studio was his fortress. In it, he created his own world where aesthetics was primary against being.
Lyudmyla Milyayeva
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