Voloshyn Gallery participates in the international fair of modern art viennacontemporary, where it presents the project of Ukrainian artists Lesia Khomenko, Oleksiy Sai and Maria Sulymenko.
In the center of the exposition, the work of Oleksiy Sai from the series Bombed, which was started by the author back in 2015 as a reaction to the current events in the country, is presented. The Bombed series unites bird’s-eye views of Eastern Ukrainian landscapes pockmarked by bomb craters left by the war. Sai obliterates the surfaces of his earlier works almost completely with disk grinders, drills and abrasive materials, transforming them into tactile maps of ruination. Gradually losing the original legible images, the works become almost abstract while remaining filled with wholly concrete meanings.
Lesia Khomenko presents new work on biflex, created during her residency in Warsaw, where Lesia stayed after escaping from Ukraine. The author started this series on February 24, 2022, after escaping Kyiv. Lesia Khomenko paints portraits of her husband's fellow soldiers from the photos he takes in the army, where he is currently stationed. For her, this is a way to participate in the struggle together with him, and also an opportunity to maintain a creative dialogue with him, as it was before he got into a new military reality. In this series, Khomenko reflects on the role and status of the image, which in a military context has become a deadly weapon.
Maria Sulymenko's watercolor drawings enter into dialogue with presented works in the style of laconic simplicity. In her works, Maria depicts mysterious and enigmatic environments. These are primarily internal, but also external spaces, narrow and closed, surrounded by walls that seem tangible. The author delicately and perfectly assembled all the details, while maintaining a sense of improvisation and ease. The characters of the paintings exist outside of time, they are placed in a conventional, sometimes naively delineated space. It represents loneliness, but also a deliberately chosen loneliness; fear and traumatic fears, as well as modern suffering and anxieties that lead to absurd situations. She quietly, almost naively, questions the difficulties of just being (and not necessarily becoming), just surviving in this world. There is no naive optimism, but there are particles of hope, she claims, waiting for better times.
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 the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Among the international fairs in which the gallery has participated in the last two years: The Armory Show, Liste Basel, Vienna Contemporary, Dallas Art Fair, Pulse Art Fair, Nada Miami, Untitled.Art, Enter Art Fair, Art Cologne, Art Athina, Expo Chgo etc. Voloshyn Gallery has been a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) since 2020.