«REPOST»
Contemporary Ukrainian art from the collection of Anatoliy Dymchuk

5.03.2021 – 18.04.2021

REPOST: contemporary Ukrainian art from the collection of Anatoliy Dymchuk

«REPOST: contemporary Ukrainian art from the collection of Anatoly Dymchuk.» exhibition project was held in the Odesa Fine Arts Museum from March 5th to April 18th. The exhibition featured more than 30 selected works by key Ukrainian artists of the 1980s and 2000s: Serhiy Bratkov, Leonid Voitsekhov, Oleksandr Hnylytsky, Igor Gusev, Oleksandr Zhyvotkov, Oleksandr Roitburd, Arsen Savadov, Oleg Tistol and others.

Anatoliy Dymchuk's collection is one of the largest art collections in Ukraine and the only one in Odesa, which comprehensively presents current trends in contemporary Ukrainian art of the independence period: from the early 1990s to the present. The collection's emphasis is on artists who have declared themselves in the Ukrainian trans avant-garde and other areas of the«new wave». The collection includes both stars of the first magnitude and young authors. Anatoliy Dymchuk's collection contains iconic, programmatic works that any museum can envy. Some of these works were seen ten years ago among the Odesa audience, and some will be a discovery.

Why REPOST?

The exhibition project is a REPRESENTATION of Ukrainian POSTmodernism. The works presented at the exhibition are an important visual archive of Ukrainian art - from late Soviet art trends to the present.

REPOST is a kind of REinterpretation of POSTmodernism - a rethinking of the work of Ukrainian artists, which has not lost its relevance for decades.

The art of postmodernism is the art of times of anxiety and helplessness. Most of the exhibited works are bright, collages full of allusions to different layers of culture, including mass. This is how artists portrayed a world that has lost its systematicity, and harmony has become an arena of mixing coincidences in which authorities and truths are devalued. All the achievements of humankind are reduced to discourse. In a sense, these large-scale paintings reflect the hypertrophied visuality of an era where being visible is a challenging task. Behind the irony and the game, which can be shocking, lies a balanced attitude to the artists' theme, courage, and intelligence.

An element of artistic language is the reminiscence of POSTmodernism. Through «borrowing», the use of images and stylistic devices from the past, artists create new meanings through their creative and intellectual rethinking. The images-objects, to which the artists appeal, demonstrate the features inherent in POSTmodernism: mixing of contexts and identities, refusal to search for truth, ironic fragmentation of fragments of ideas and images.

REPOST is a revision of postulates - a revision of the fundamental ideological, political, moral, and artistic doctrines of the period of Soviet totalitarianism. Ukrainian realities in artists' works are represented by several unsettled, unresolved fragments of problems: the post-Soviet mentality and collective nostalgia are ironically severe, skeptical, and defiant in artists' works.

And finally - Remarque-postscript:

The first curatorial project of Anatoliy Dymchuk in Odesa and Kyiv in 2009-2010, which presented the work of Ukrainian artists of the 1990s, was called RESTART. In a sense, our exhibition is a supplemented RESTART REPOST.

In the preface to the RESTART catalog, Dymchuk noted:«We focus on Ukrainian contemporary art, not forgetting for a moment that its existence is possible only in the international context. And we are gathering stars in Odesa, not for the sake of status but another truly productive step.»

Over the next decade, many «productive steps» have been taken: contemporary Ukrainian art from the collection of Anatoliy Dymchuk has been presented at many Ukrainian and European art forums.

And today, we are again «collecting stars in Odesa» - Anatoliy Dymchuk: from RESTART to REPOST.