From folk to modern in Ukraine’s early 20th-century art | Kultura 2024

Katia Denysova, a research fellow at the University of Tübingen and co-curator of the In the Eye of the Storm exhibition, examines how artists worked with the Ukrainian vernacular culture to create modernist aesthetic amid socio-political upheaval in Ukraine.

In the early 20th century, at the time when the Ukrainian lands were divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, many artists from Ukraine experimented with some of the latest and most radical art trends, which they discovered while travelling and studying in western Europe. Underpinning their innovative formalist explorations, – from Symbolism to Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism – however, was a profound knowledge of and fascination with Ukrainian folk and decorative traditions. In this seminar, through the practice of Alexandra Exter and Mykhailo Boichuk, two artists represented in the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, we will examine how artists worked with the Ukrainian vernacular culture to create modernist aesthetic during the period of unprecedented socio-political upheaval in Ukraine

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