The jubilee exhibition of prominent Ukrainian and internationally recognized artist Ivan Marchuk was opened in the Montenegrin art gallery “Miodrag Dado Đurić” in Cetinje.
The exhibition organized by the National Museum of Montenegro and the Association for the Development of International Relations ADRUM, with the support of the Embassy of Ukraine in Montenegro, on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the artist’s birth, includes 48 works from different periods of his creativity.
The exhibition is designed to acquaint the Montenegrin audience with the work of this great artist, whose work is studied in schools and colleges and to whom the museum currently being created in Kiev is dedicated, according to the decree of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
Opening the exhibition, art historian Snežana Ivović said that Ivan Marčuk’s rich creative oeuvre numbered around five thousand works, many of which are in world museums as well as private collections.
– The turmoil of the soul, the personal and collective traumas of humanity, the eternal search for the meaning of existence, the artist expressed through a series of 14 cycles – the so-called March 14. Materialized through different stylistic determinants, each of these cycles, which bear witness to an artist of exceptional creativity, specific expressive potential, unshakable in consistency with his ideals, bear the stamp of impermanence and universal value – said Ivović and added that a special whole in the exhibition is represented by a series of paintings made with the technique which the artist designed in 1972, under the name “Plontanism”, which means entanglement, undulation. Observing the fascinating beauty of bare trees against the blue, he realized that none of the techniques he knew could convey the natural lace of leafless branches. With this technique, a combination of refined brush strokes, intricate thin threads of a lacy structure, refined color and subtle light effects, fluid blur, which evokes the magic of the unreal, the artist, according to her, transferred the magical visions of Ukrainian regions to the canvas.
– We believe that looking at the work of an artist who is considered one of the most prominent representatives of the older generation of the Ukrainian art scene will broaden the horizons of the Montenegrin audience and offer the possibility of enjoying great painting – Snežana Ivović concluded.
Chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of Ukraine in Montenegro, Natalia Fialko, thanked the organizers of the exhibition – the National Museum of Montenegro, Anastasia Miranović and her collaborators, with whom the project was launched, and thanks to whom today we have the opportunity to see this extraordinary experience of a prominent creator. Ivan Marchuk, as Fialko emphasized, is the pride of Ukraine and a part of the Ukrainian soul – he is in Montenegro tonight to share a part of that part with us.
Ivan Marčuk pointed out that it was worth coming to Montenegro because the space of the gallery in Cetinje opened and presented his works in the best possible way. He said that he always said that he would not fully know himself until he recognized everything he painted. He hopes that Montenegro will host his other paintings and that the audience will be able to feel the joy they bring.
He was born in 1936 in the village of Moskalivka, in the Ternopil region, in a family of weavers. From 1951 to 1956, he studied at the School of Applied Arts in Lviv – Department of Decorative Painting. After serving in the army, he continued his studies at the Department of Ceramics of the Lviv Institute of Applied Arts, graduating in 1965. From 1965, he lived and worked in Kiev at the Institute of Superhard Materials of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1968 to 1984, he worked in the creative production studio of the Association “Artist” of the Art Fund of the USSR. Although highly respected among the Ukrainian artistic avant-garde, the Soviet official art of a hard socialist realist orientation had no understanding for the advanced, innovative and free ideas of Ivan Marchuk. He was forced to leave the country. From 1989 to 2001, he lived in Australia, Canada and the United States of America, where he achieved notable success, after which he returned to Ukraine, to which he remains permanently attached to this day. In 1990, Marchuk held the first official exhibition in Kyiv (Ukrainian State Museum of Fine Arts, today – National Art Museum of Ukraine). In 1997, he received the national award “Taras Shevchenko”, and in 2001 he finally returned to Ukraine. In 2006, the International Academy of Contemporary Art in Rome admitted him to the “Golden Guild” and he was elected an honorary member of the Scientific Council. In October 2017, the British magazine “Daily Telegraph” included him among the “One Hundred Geniuses of our Time”. On June 11, 2021, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signed the Decree on the establishment of the Ivan Marchuk Museum and Cultural Center of Contemporary Art. In 2021, he received a special award from the President of Ukraine – “National Legend of Ukraine”.
The curator of the exhibition is Snežana Ivović, and the collaborator on the project is art historian Miloš Marjanović.
The exhibition will last until November 15, 2021.