June 11 – 16, 2018, new location: ELSÄSSERSTRASSE 215, BASEL, a 3 minute walk from VOLTAPLATZ, booth #В18
Voloshyn Gallery is proud to announce its participation in VOLTA14 Basel 2018 contemporary art fair under the aegis of Art Basel Week, and is happy to represent the works of three artists: Maria Sulymenko, Zhanna Kadyrova, and Anastasiia Podervianska.
The international VOLTA fair was founded in Basel (Switzerland) in 2005, debuting in New York as VOLTA NY in 2008. Its history, which goes back 14 years, began at Volta-Platz, right around the corner from the COOP distribution center (the fair’s current location). This year, VOLTA inaugurates COOP as Basel’s newest art hub, and a new space for discovery. The new location is next to Novartis Campus, at Elsässerstrasse 215.
“Throughout the years, VOLTA consistently claimed new territory through content and location. Always evolving, continuously reinventing our shape, consistently moving forward, constantly exploring new terrains and positions. We aim to do what we do best: providing a platform for professional gallery work while remaining a place for research and discovery,” comments Amanda Coulson, VOLTA Artistic Director and co-founder.
VOLTA14 will host 74 galleries from 28 countries, including Voloshyn Gallery’s debut at VOLTA Basel. Earlier this year, it participated in the March fair VOLTA NY (New York).
Voloshyn Gallery booth will feature the project The Glass World of People and Things by Maria Sulymenko, a German artist of Ukrainian origins. Her understated laconic watercolors never fail to captivate. Events seem to decelerate and freeze in mid-air, plunged into the grey tranquil atmospheric space.
The artist stated that, instead of setting concrete goals or coming up with theoretical concepts, she explores both what she sees and the way she sees it in her works. The desire to convey the atmosphere comes first. “I always liked office spaces, these strange, mysterious, empty planes endowed with their own rituals and hierarchies. What’s going on there? What do people do? Maybe they just idle about, or maybe they are developing plans for world domination. I’m always passionate about my characters, no matter how marginal; they are generalizations rather than real people, but I like to think that they have a life of their own beyond the frame,” Maria Sulymenko explained.
The artist meticulously arranges all the details while leaving the overall impression of an impromptu improvisation. Her protagonists do not belong to any era in particular, and exist in somewhat conditional configurations, often in a naively stylized environment evocative of the subconscious rather than the evident. There is something deeply existential about the absurdity inherent in all these events. The watercolors beg the question: are Sulymenko’s protagonists everymen going with the flow, or are they nonconformists who choose to cherish their solitude?
The Glass World of People and Things encourages the conclusion that people keep trying to surround themselves with pointless knickknacks and excessive objects. What for? It could provide comfort, a sense of belonging to a given social group, and solace from existential solitude and anxiety of desocialization.
Maria Sulymenko was born in 1981 in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the family of artists. She graduated from the T.H. Shevchenko State Comprehensive Art School (Kyiv) before moving to Germany for university studies. She studied sculpture and painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. After graduation, she studied graphic design at Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main, where her professors included such acclaimed figures as ATAK (Georg Barber) and Eike König. Maria, who creates large-format paintings on paper and canvas, developed her artistic style in Germany. In 2016-2017, Voloshyn Gallery presented her works at SCOPE in Miami and in Basel. At present, Sulymenko lives and works in Irndorf, Germany.
The artist and sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova works in the tradition of site-specific art, creating objects, installations, mosaics and sculpture. Urban studies are a prominent theme in her works. Kadyrova’s Unapparent Shapes, featured at the gallery’s booth, explores how mostly invisible, ephemeral phenomena transform into their opposites: tangible shapes that clutter the space. Kadyrova creates physical embodiments for the play of light and shadow, moulding them in cement. We seldom register the lamps that emit light waves or cast shadows. And yet, their invisibility is illusory: in reality, these mechanisms intrude into our lives, and their existence has weighty consequences that range from the positive (lighting dark spaces) to the sinister (intruding upon private lives). Some objects of “unapparent shape” are created within the exhibition space to fit its architectural peculiarities and to better underscore the seeming invisibility of light and shadows.
Zhanna Kadyrova was born in 1981 in the town of Brovary, just outside Kyiv, Ukraine. She graduated from the Department of Sculpture of the T.H. Shevchenko State Comprehensive Art School (Kyiv) in 1999. She juggernauted multiple art groups, exhibitions and performances, including R.E.P. (Ukrainian abbreviation for Revolutionary Experimental Space), Pinoplast punk band, 8 = 8, The Conquered City, The City of Victors, Neither the Jury Nor the Prize, and New History (at the Kharkiv Museum of Fine Arts). She curates exhibitions at LabGarage (Kyiv). In 2009, she created The Monument to a New Monument in the town of Sharhorod, Ukraine. She was awarded the special PinchukArtCentre prize in 2011, the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize for her Shape of Light (in Public Art category) in April 2012, the Kazimir Malevich Prize in December 2012, and the PinchukArtCentre Main Prize in 2013. She participated in many international exhibitions, including the 5th Moscow Biennale, the Ukrainian pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Nouvelles Vagues, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013). In 2014, she joined the art residence of the Baró Galeria (São Paulo, Brazil). In 2016, she took part in an exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). The artist lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Anastasiia Podervianska’s textile Light My Fire from the Country-Horror series blends several divergent aesthetic programs, including cosmopolitan urbanism and folkloric motifs. The intersection of Ukrainian decorative art and ethno-romanticism with comics elements produces a space filled with symbols and riddles that expands our interpretation of reality, lending the work cross-cultural importance and helping it to transcend archaic traditionalist readings. The work depicts Eve tempted by the paradise apple. She is surrounded by Biblical symbols, including Adam’s rib and symbolic representations of passions and sins. The painting is framed by short quotes from Jim Morrison’s song for the band The Doors, embroidered with a golden thread.
Anastasiia Podervianska was born in 1978 in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the family of artists. She graduated from the T.H. Shevchenko State Comprehensive Art School in 1996, and from the Department of Monumental Art of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (advisor: Academy of Arts member Mykola Storozhenko) in 2002. A member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2002. Podervianska’s works can be found in the Eurolab Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ukraine, as well as in private collections in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Macedonia, and the USA. The artist actively participates in shows and residencies. She lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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.
Voloshyn Gallery fosters the integration of Ukrainian art into global cultural processes, representing its artists at international art fairs and shows in Europe and the US.
Voloshyn Gallery aims to discover exceptional talent, with particular focus on emerging and mid-career artists.
Its cutting-edge exhibition space is located in Kyiv’s cultural and historical center, on Tereshchenkivska Street, in a historic 1913 building formerly owned by a renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist N.A. Tereshchenko. The collector and philanthropist Bohdan Khanenko bought the building for his wife Varvara, renovating it as a revenue house. Its second floor was envisioned as an exhibition and storage space for Khanenko’s expanding museum of fine arts.
Maksym and Julia Voloshyn have been active in the art business since 2006. Their first gallery, Mystetska Zbirka Art Gallery, specialized in classical and post-war 20th century Ukrainian art. In 2015, the Voloshyns made it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.
ELSÄSSERSTRASSE 215, 4056 BASEL
adjacent to Novartis Campus
3 min walk from Voltaplatz
Voloshyn Gallery
Kyiv, 13 Tereschenkivska Str., entrance through the arch, the 2nd yard
+38 067 467 00 07, +38 044 234 14 27 info@voloshyngallery.art, www.voloshyngallery.art
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