The National Art Gallery in Sofia will be showing a major retrospective of Ukrainian art, titled In the Eye of the Storm. Modernism in Ukraine. The exhibition, which was presented Tuesday, features over 60 works from the Ukrainian National Museum and other museums in Kyiv, Poltava, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv.
“There has never been such a retrospective in Bulgaria. We believe that it is extremely important at the moment to show the Bulgarian audience the history of Ukrainian art with the most interesting and serious periods of cultural change, which are also relevant to Bulgarian culture from the late 19th and the first 30 years of the 20th century,” said National Gallery Director Yaroslava Bubnova.
According to Olesya Ilashchuk, Ukranian Ambassador in Sofia, this is a unique project that is travelling around Europe, and has already been shown in several other places. “This exhibition shows that Ukrainian modernism is an important part of world modernism. Its most diverse manifestations are shown, from figurative painting to Futurism and Constructivism. The exhibition aims to show the original face of Ukrainian art and to introduce European viewers to the diversity of Ukrainian modernism, which the Russian imperial culture has long pushed into the shadows or simply appropriated,” said the Ambassador.
In her words, Ukrainian modernism evolved amid a storm, against the backdrop of the First World War and the Civil War. “The world might have known many more Ukrainian artists of that era had they not been destroyed by the imperial storm of the time. Now contemporary Ukrainian culture and all those who create it are in the middle of the same storm, the same destructive imperial force destroying contemporary artists with its missiles and drones. We are all at the epicentre of contemporary barbarism,” said Ambassador Ilashchuk.
She said that the war made the transportation of the works of art from museums and private collections in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, to the exhibition venues “a secret special operation”. “The exhibits were loaded on two trucks accompanied by a military convoy, and left Kyiv across the Polish border, shortly before the massive Russian missile strike on November 15, 2022,” the Ambassador said.
Yaroslava Bubnova explained that the main work on building this image of Ukrainian modernism – for the first time on such a scale – was done by art historians and curators Konstantin Akinsha and Katia Denysova.
The exhibition travels to various European cities and is scheduled for presentation in some of the most prestigious museums. “As unpleasant as it may be, most of these museums, like we are here, are showing for the first time a historical retrospective of Ukrainian art,” said the director of the NHG.
In her words, this exhibition is extremely interesting for Bulgaria: “We are talking about the late 19th and early 20th century, when artists living in Ukraine were still traditionally educated at the art academy, in St. Petersburg, and it was extremely conservative at that time. Quite a few Ukrainian artists went to Vienna and Munich. Bulgarian artists and architects were doing the same, at the same time. There are some very interesting parallels in the relationship with European culture.”
In the Eye of the Storm will be visiting Sofia from October this year until January 2025. The project was conceived by curators Yulia Litvinets – director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova, Marina Drobotyuk, Olena Kashuba-Volvach, and is being implemented with support from collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza. The exhibition was first shown at the National Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in November 2022, followed by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. Before Sofia, the exhibition will be shown at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.