VILLAGE GLAM

ARTISTIC VOYAGES SEARCHING FOR
UKRAINIAN MEGA-STYLE
(Ukrainian handicraft paintings 1930 – 1960-s)
This collection of village glam, which we present you, was collecting during more than ten years. The majority of the paintings, which are included to the exposition, are taken from the Central (Kyiv, Cherkasy, Poltava) and Northern (Chernigiv, Sumy) parts of Ukraine. They were created in the villages and little towns of Ukraine in 1930 – 1960-s period and belong to still not researched but very popular genre of handicraft (or so called “bazaar”) art which was very popular in those years. The history didn’t save the names of the authors of these masterpieces. Besides the term “masterpieces” was highly used exclusively in ironic sense of the word. The official art establishment’s criticism and the social realistic (communist) reality and propaganda did not only percept this art but even fought against as they called displaying of  “bad taste” and the “survival of capitalism” with the press of soviet tax inspectors, “cleaning up the markets from so called “vulgar bourgeois infection” and sometimes even destroyed these paintings as the “petty- bourgeois pseudo- art”.
Times passed and the author of these words understood that these “bad taste” and “vulgar bourgeois infection” have the right to be presented in the other context. Due to these paintings we can affirm that there was the other style in Ukrainian art-life different from official accepted “art-religion” of those years called socialistic (communist) realism, this different art was the “Ukrainian national pop-art” with the special for this style features- circulations of arch-typical subjects, using of colorful (sometimes technical and synthetic) paints, taking pop-images, which brightened up peoples fantasy (the trophy German, American and later- the Indian movies, western post-cards, stamps, matches labels, etc.), for the topic of the paintings.
The colorful paints, the feerie of the subjects and the whole “paradise carelessness” of these paintings’ heroes substituted for the television, the myth “ideals” of the glam magazines, took away the viewer to the world of dreams and pulled out for some time from the dull everyday hungry reality. And don’t these paintings seem to be the праобразами of this world, which is around us today, the world of the total power of glamour and глянцу in one half-destroyed agrarian country?
We suppose that this journey by the paths of Ukrainian mega-style named “Village Glam” will arouse your interest, only the positive emotions and the recover cultural shock!
With the best wishes and thanks,
Sincerely,
Antin Muharsky,
(The first “Village Glam” discoverer and researcher).
P.S. We also plan to create one great monumental art-piece, which will consist of over than one thousand people’s paintings, and this will became the definite confirmation of the big scale of this art phenomenon in the Ukrainian and world cultural context.

ARTISTIC VOYAGES SEARCHING FOR UKRAINIAN MEGA-STYLE

(Ukrainian handicraft paintings 1930 – 1960-s)

antin_glam

This collection of village glam, which we present you, was collecting during more than ten years. The majority of the paintings, which are included to the exposition, are taken from the Central (Kyiv, Cherkasy, Poltava) and Northern (Chernigiv, Sumy) parts of Ukraine. They were created in the villages and little towns of Ukraine in 1930 – 1960-s period and belong to still not researched but very popular genre of handicraft (or so called “bazaar”) art which was very popular in those years. The history didn’t save the names of the authors of these masterpieces. Besides the term “masterpieces” was highly used exclusively in ironic sense of the word. The official art establishment’s criticism and the social realistic (communist) reality and propaganda did not only percept this art but even fought against as they called displaying of  “bad taste” and the “survival of capitalism” with the press of soviet tax inspectors, “cleaning up the markets from so called “vulgar bourgeois infection” and sometimes even destroyed these paintings as the “petty- bourgeois pseudo- art”.

Times passed and the author of these words understood that these “bad taste” and “vulgar bourgeois infection” have the right to be presented in the other context. Due to these paintings we can affirm that there was the other style in Ukrainian art-life different from official accepted “art-religion” of those years called socialistic (communist) realism, this different art was the “Ukrainian national pop-art” with the special for this style features- circulations of arch-typical subjects, using of colorful (sometimes technical and synthetic) paints, taking pop-images, which brightened up peoples fantasy (the trophy German, American and later- the Indian movies, western post-cards, stamps, matches labels, etc.), for the topic of the paintings.

The colorful paints, the feerie of the subjects and the whole “paradise carelessness” of these paintings’ heroes substituted for the television, the myth “ideals” of the glam magazines, took away the viewer to the world of dreams and pulled out for some time from the dull everyday hungry reality. And don’t these paintings seem to be the праобразами of this world, which is around us today, the world of the total power of glamour and глянцу in one half-destroyed agrarian country?

We suppose that this journey by the paths of Ukrainian mega-style named “Village Glam” will arouse your interest, only the positive emotions and the recover cultural shock!

With the best wishes and thanks,

Sincerely,

Antin Muharsky,

(The first “Village Glam” discoverer and researcher).

P.S. We also plan to create one great monumental art-piece, which will consist of over than one thousand people’s paintings, and this will became the definite confirmation of the big scale of this art phenomenon in the Ukrainian and world cultural context.