Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present a solo project by Ukrainian-American artist Janet Sobel. Having immigrated to the US from Ukraine as a teenager, her paintings reveal dream-like visions of Ukrainian culture merged with the realities of her life in the US.

 

Janet Sobel's work encapsulates the multifacetedness of the 20th century and conveys the artist's lived experience. A housewife with no connections in the art sphere, Sobel took up painting in her forties, soon attracting the attention of gallerists and fellow artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. As an early innovator of "all-over" abstraction, she is known for her mastery of color and multilayered compositions some of which are currently in the collections of LACMA and MOMA. Clement Greenberg positioned Sobel as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism in general and of Jackson Pollock in particular. Working in a society that granted more of its favor to male artists, Sobel has become an unjustly neglected figure in the art historical canon. Despite this, her art is currently being rediscovered and studied by academics and collectors in an attempt to unveil the real Janet Sobel.

 

Voloshyn Gallery presents a series of works by Janet Sobel that showcase daily scenes from American society and her growing anxieties about the ongoing WW2. The show incorporates paintings depicting soldiers on the battlefields, refugees, figures wearing traditional Ukrainian flower crowns, and cannons. Works painted in hues of brown, yellow, and red are somber, revealing the emotional turmoil the artist must have felt when hearing the news about the German occupation of her hometown. Those works, however, are far from an accurate depiction of the actual events occurring in Ukraine during WW2. Sobel draws heavily on the distant memories of her Ukrainian childhood, the country's orthodox iconography, and folk art traditions, creating a series of works that retain a sense of innocence and wonder despite the heavy subject matter. Her wartime paintings are especially relevant today, amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine. They mirror the experience of thousands of immigrants who can only visit their ancestral land in memories and dreams.

 

Born Yevhenia Olechovska in Katerynoslav, near Dnipro, Ukraine, she moved to New York with her mother and siblings shortly after her father's death during a Russian Army pogrom in 1905. In her late teens, she married Max Sobel, with whom she had five children. Janet Sobel took up painting in her late forties, about 1937 or 1938. As a predominantly self-taught artist, Sobel was inspired by the folk art of her homeland, including traditional costumes and ornate craft objects. Her unique style combined the traditional with the modern, resulting in a powerful expression of her cultural identity. A significant aspect of Sobel's early drawings is her synthesis of Ukrainian iconography and images of war. She juxtaposed the familiar and the unfamiliar, crafting a compelling visual statement on the global war. By incorporating both American and Ukrainian figures in her depictions of soldiers and wartime chaos, Sobel simultaneously evoked a sense of nostalgia for her cultural heritage and addressed the turmoil caused by the horror of war, particularly the themes of suffering, sacrifice, and loss.