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Untitled, Art 2021
29 November —
04 December 2021

selected works

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UNTITLED ART is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. UNTITLED, ART innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue.

Voloshyn Gallery is proud the present the works of Ukrainian artists Nikita Kadan and Oleksiy Sai at Untitled ART.

Nikita Kadan presentshis works Tiger’s Leap, The Sun and Satellite, as well as a work from the Broken Flag Pole series. This series addresses the legacy of the avant-garde (including the works of the artist Vasyl Yermilov), offering a modern take on it. The Broken Flag Pole is comprised of iron, resin-covered shields and silk prints of photographs of the ruins caused by the military hostilities in Donbas. The Sun and Satelliteis a continuation of the Private Sun series, started in 2013. Window bars in the shape of the sun are a crucial element of post-Soviet urban landscapes. Despite offering an ostensibly vibrant and optimistic image, bars emblematize repressions, limitations and the subjugation of individuality in the Soviet space. Tiger’s Leapreconstructs the spears made by the rebellious workers of the machine-building plant in Horlivka (Donbas) during the 1905 military uprising.

Nikita Kadan works with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. Nikita Kadan represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2015.Awards: Kazimir Malevich Prize, 2016; Future Generation Prize (special prize), 2014 Maiмn Prize, PinchukArtCentre Prize, 2011; shortlisted for PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2009 and for Future Generation Prize in 2012.Works in public collections: Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), National ArtMuseum of Ukraine, Kyiv, Arsenal Gallery, Białystok, Military History Museum, Dresden, The Art Collection Telekom, Krasnoyarsk museum centre, Krasnoyarsk, The Kingdom of Belgium, Ministery of Foreign Affairs, FRAC Bretagne, Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato,Сentre Pompidou in Paris.

Lesia Khomenko presents her work from the Giants series. Giants is one of the first projects by Lesia Khomenko, on which the artist worked from 2006 to 2012. This is a series of large-format paintings in which ordinary people - the "heroes" of the modern world – are presented from the "frog's point of view." In her practice, the artist turns to the East European identity associated with the Ukrainian academic art system. In her early works, Khomenko simultaneously criticizes and reinterprets elements of the visual language that is rooted in the post-soviet figurative school.

Another work belongs to Lesia Khomenko’s series, Personal Vocation.The term “affined work” was coined by the idealist philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, who believed that each individual has an affinity for toil of a certain kind, and happiness lies in finding the work for which one has a natural affinity. Lesia gives the term new relevance by trying to introduce it to the field of critical discourse and juxtaposing it to Marx’s still relevant notion of alienated work. The figures of workers are inscribed into the canvases in a way that leaves the impression that the paintings are “too small” for them. Their legs rest on the paintings’ edge while their heads are squeezed into a corner; sometimes they don’t even fit into the painting. This formal method is a metaphor for the social and economic conditions that the workers currently face. The base in soft colors serves as the background for these figures. For Lesia, these neutral colors of “cutting-edge interior design” are a symbol of the illusory happiness and material wellbeing. The juxtaposition of these colors and the “squeezed-in” workers lends the paintings dramatic tension.

Lesia Khomenko was born in 1980 in Kyiv, where she lives and works now. She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in 2004. In 2005-2006 she took part in the residence of the Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA; in 2008 - at the LIA residence (Leipzig InternationalArt program) in Leipzig, Germany. Since 2004 she has been a co-founder and memberof the REP group, and since 2008 of the HUDRADA curatorial association. Her works have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, including the main project of the Kyiv Biennale Arsenale in 2012, as well as exhibitionsat the National Art Museum of Ukraine, New York's White Box gallery, Vienna's MUMOK, and Zaheta gallery in Warsaw. Lesia Khomenko is a nominee for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2009, 2011, and 2013 and the Future generation art prize as part of the R.E.P. in 2012, founded by Victor Pinchuk, as well as the winner of the Kazimir Malevich Prize in 2012 and 2016.

Oleksiy Sai had created a new series of paintings for Untitled Art, continuing to explore his vision of the monotonous life of office workers. Sai’s new works are portraits of tin soldiers in business suits through which he addresses the formation of the class of office drones. His protagonists, the faceless managers, become more humane and gain individual features as they age and depart from the principles of consumerist society. It should be noted that Sai creates a markedly neutral and objective representation of every facet of office workers’ lives: the artist doesn’t set out to criticize or caricature the corporate “lifestyle.”

Another work belongs to Oleksiy Sai’s series, Bombed. This series, which depicts maps overlaid over other works from his Excel-Art series, is an expansion of the artist’s earlier project. In 2014-2015, during the hottest days of the war in eastern regions of Ukraine, Oleksiy looked at satellite images of the bombed territories at Google Maps. After that, he took a grinder to his earlier works and “destroyed” them in order to created a new series, entitled Bombed. The artist is of the belief that no adult person can exist outside politics, which forms our reality.

Oleksiy Sai was born in 1975 in Kyiv, where he lives and works to this day. He graduated from the Kyiv College of Arts and Industries with a degree in graphic design in 1993, and from the Department of Easel Graphic Art at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in 2001.PinchukArtCentre Prize nominee ’09, he is widely exhibited. Oleksiy Sai took part in many groupand solo exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad. His works were exhibited at Black Square Gallery (Miami, the USA), Saatchi Gallery (London, the UK), Bunsen Goertz Gallery (Nurembreg, Germany), PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art (Perm, Russia), etc. 

Founded in October 2016 by Max and Julia Voloshyn, Voloshyn Gallery specializes in contemporary art. It showcases a broad range of media in contemporary art, hosting solo and group exhibitions and participating in leading contemporary art fairs. In 2015, the Voloshyns made it to theForbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Voloshyn Gallery is a member of The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).Voloshyn Gallery fosters the integration of Ukrainian art into global cultural processes. It presents an exciting and diverse exhibition programme, as well as working in partnership with institutions, independent curators in realising both on and off-site projects.

Voloshyn Gallery participates in leading contemporary art fairs. Over the course of the last twoyears, the gallery has participated in The Armory Show, Vienna Contemporary, Dallas Art Fair, Pulse Art Fair, Nada Miami, Untitled.Art, and EXPO CHICAGO. Zhanna Kadyrova's solo presentation from Voloshyn Gallery was awarded the Pulse Prize (2018) at the Pulse Art Fair. The project was also noted by the curators of the Perez Art Museum Miami.