Untitled Art 2022
Voloshyn Gallery proudly presents a group show of Ukrainian artists Lesia Khomenko, Nikita Kadan, Oleksiy Sai, and Mykola Ridnyi at Untitled Art Miami Beach 2022. Many of the works showcased in the booth were created before the russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, taking on new meaning in today’s environment. Other works were created amidst the invasion that has shaken the world. Working on the edge of different techniques and media, while combining research with intuition, artists showcases the significance of an artistic statement in time of war and how artworks garner new weight in the context of history.
Lesia Khomenko's artistic practice is currently focused on the ways of looking at the war and the ways the war represents itself. In her works, the artist combines found images with her experience of war and experiences of her nearest and dearest. Continuing to analyze the connections between the place, its political subjectivity, and artistic practice, Lesia has found a precise method to articulate how the mediums of painting and photography get
conditioned by martial law. In her new series Untitled, the artist depicts soldiers unknown to her on large canvases. The artist is interested in the media aspect of the war, particularly the cyber war. Ukraine's martial law prohibits taking photos of military facilities, soldiers, and equipment on security grounds. Photography ceases to be an instrument and becomes a dangerous weapon. By turning found pictures into paintings, the artist references the historical tradition of depicting war and translates the language of digital imagery into that of painting. And ideas become a tool in their original form. The artist uses images, giving them opposite meanings. She draws a parallel between the artistic view and military optics in objectifying the body in the built distance.
Nikita Kadan engages in a dialogue with works by Lesia Khomenko and presents works from the series Observations on Archives and from the series Broken Pole. In this series, the author offers to consider the topic of destruction and oblivion and loss of heritage. After all, the archive turns out to be an excessive and impermissible luxury in the conditions of "austerity" and social catastrophe - which returns human experience to a state of homogeneity. The internal connections and structure of the narrative are destroyed and crumbled, turning into a mass of loose indivisible material and, thus, giving simple integrity. In his the Broken Pole series, Kadan addresses the avant-garde legacy (the works of the artist Vasyl Yermilov, among others), reimagining it with a contemporary flair. The Broken Pole brings together resin-coated metal shields and silk prints of photographs of the buildings destroyed during the military hostilities in Donbas.
The earlier works by Oleksiy Sai and Mykola Ridnyi assume new meanings in today’s environment. This process is symptomatically represented by works from the Shelter series by Mykola Ridnyi, which was evacuated from Kharkiv in the spring of this year. Created in 2012 and 2013, the sculptures depict different bomb shelters, both as relics and as a phenomenon that found new meaning: first, in 2014, and now, in 2022, as many bomb shelters returned to their initial purpose after the invasion.
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.
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