Yeah, I am finally in Kiev. Back to my home town, after almost 3 months of infinite grayness and weird weather. Omg, Kiev You have no idea how I`ve missed you...
My last three days of life where and allegory to hell. Had loads of things to do and no time at all, this is one of the reasons why I haven`t posted anything in here. The second reason is that I am really sick, and I can`t even think. My doctor prescribed me antibiotics today...
But, you know, I can`t stay in bed for an entire day, so we went down to the National Museum of Arts. I was really happy to see that their exhibition was dedicated to one great but not really known Ukrainian Painter of the 60-ies -- Liudmila Yastreb. She has lived only 35 years, But has done a multitude of very interesting works, and has been the generator of ideas in the group of painters in Odessa. She was a part of the nonconformist group of painters.
I would like to add here, that Soviet Nonconformist Art has been classified as a movement outside of the Social Realism movement. It is often referred as 'unofficial art' or 'underground art'. Soviet Nonconformist Art has seen a real uprise after the death of Stalin. With the arrival of Khrushchev into power, a more free and comfortable atmosphere has been discovered, and the fear for being rerpressed for his/her 'nonconformist art' has ceased to be so severe. Here are a few words by a Russian Curator, author and museum director on the nonconformist party:
"The duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination leads to a situation where art plays a special role in society. In any culture, art is a special reality, but in the Soviet Union, art was doubly real precisely because it had no relation to reality. It was a higher reality.... The goal of nonconformism in art was to challenge the status of official artistic reality, to question it, to treat it with irony. Yet that was the one unacceptable thing. All of Soviet society rested on orthodoxy, and nonconformism was its enemy. That is why even the conditional and partial legalization of nonconformism in the mid-1970s was the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime."
(From:Bakshtein, Joseph. "A View from Moscow," Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 332).
Liudmila Yastreb has exhibited her works in private places, such as hidden apartments. She has tried to paint with different techniques in order to find her own unique on. I am now falling asleep, please enjoy the pictures.))
