![]() ![]() ![]() And the scariest part was that I interfered with the holy of holies - social realism, and began destroying it… in all of my art.” The fact that I came from Lviv, you know, made me a nationalist. This treatment lasted for years, reaching its peak in the 1970s, and caused Marchuk’s art to be under an unofficial ban for over 17 years. Since Marchuk’s work challenged the conventions of social realism, the Soviet government sought to ruin his artistic career by ignoring or suppressing his work and even directing the KGB to directly persecute and threaten him. Everything that didn’t fall under social realism was considered ideologically harmful - meaning anything figurative and abstract, complex and moody, any search for a free form. According to Ukrainian art historians, this dualism where artists seemingly existed in two dimensions was caused by the specific structure of Soviet artistic life. That Ivan Marchuk worked on two fronts - officially and underground - was characteristic of most artists of that time. ![]() As he states, he worked restlessly under the motto “I am who I am.” At that time, he moved away from graphic drawings and seriously took up ink and tempera. Marchuk completed all work orders quickly, so that he could have time to paint what truly interested him, what came from heart. He got a teaching job at the Institute for Superhard Materials and later worked at the Kyiv Combine of Monumental and Decorative Art which was dominated by soviet ideological artistic monotony and where western technologies were either filtered or not used at all. What a hurdle that was, a crazy hurdle that I needed to overcome and come out on a completely different side.”Īfter finishing his studies in the late 1960s, Marchuk moved from Lviv to Kyiv. “I was older than my colleagues, but at the time they were ahead of me in their approach to modern art, so I needed to transform into a modern ground-breaking artist. Ivan Marchuk’s early work relied on naive art themes but after being introduced to avant-garde and modernism, he found the beginning of his own path in art. ![]()
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