Hard to Describe

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present Hard to Describe, a solo show by Yevgen Samborsky on view at the gallery’s Miami location. The show is his second with the gallery and his first in the United States. 

 

Hard to Describe presents recent works by Samborsky that address themes of poverty and economic imbalance within the context of geopolitics, societies, and institutions of art. Using every day observations as a starting point, Samborsky allows his work to blur the lines between the serious and humorous, ultimately creating a distance from his original starting point and enabling a new vision of the complexities and perspectives that have been formed within the work. After having been displaced from Ukraine in 2023 due to the full-scale invasion by Russia, this approach is particularly personal, as Samborsky represents his current displacement from a disrupted vantage point in a volatile geopolitical landscape. 

 

Featured in the show are works from the artist's painting series titled “When You Wanted Unpredictability and Finally Got It”. Working with oil and acrylic on nylon, the series represents the artist on his “forced journey”, as Samborsky was displaced from Ukraine after the attack by Russia in 2023, which brought him first to Warsaw and eventually London. The choice of nylon is a practical one - it is thin, lightweight, and easily transportable, all of which are extraordinarily useful for a nomadic artist such as himself. Set amidst a vague abstracted ground of terra-forma-like space and atmosphere, delicate representations of sparse details that resemble a personal diary drift throughout the compositions, locating matter and meaning in fleeting moments of physical and metaphysical chaos. The work alludes to a journey with an unknown destination that manages to grasp onto fragments of its rapidly shifting landscapes, memories of a former life, and newly encountered sensations.

 

Working along a similar theme of locating personal meaning within ones surroundings, the artist has on display multiple paintings from his series “Fragments of Daily Life”. Samborsky describes the works as “the merging of my everyday life as a refugee with the losses that Ukrainian culture is currently experiencing.” Starting with digital images, Samborsky portrays numerous museums in Ukraine, such as the Kuindzhi Museum and Maria Prymachenko Museum, which were both greatly damaged during the conflict with Russia. The work UNTITLED (COMPOSITION WITH THE KHANENKO MUSEUM) presents a photo of the empty Khanenko Museum centered within a vast black void, its parameters unknown while sparse elements of flora spiral lyrically throughout the space. The museum housed the largest art collection in Ukraine, and is located in a historic building near the Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv. The museum's facade is now damaged from recent rocket debris that fell from the sky, leaving a crater in a nearby playground. 

 

With his second show with Volsohyn Gallery, Samborsky presents a poetic personal statement on the shared struggles of refugees and the challenges they face. With a distinct formal sensitivity, his paintings illuminate the notions of struggle and dislocation, while demonstrating a remarkable sense of fortitude and strength.