It is already not for the first time that the Kyivan artists, Andriy Kovalenko and Olha Kovtun, represent their works within our gallery. Therefore, one can track the creative development of the both artists while visiting our gallery, the Iconart.
The students of the Mykola Storozhenko’s workshop in the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, they showed themselves up quite early as the outstanding artists with their own pictorial manner. Having plunged into the Ukrainian and the European Renaissance and baroque pictorial art studying the artists have managed to create the special world of the colours, the signs and the images, which cannot be mixed up with anything. In the noisy world of the new technical achievements, Olha Kovtun and Andriy Kovalenko find the place for calmness of the past times that have passed away a long time ago inviting every of us, the spectators, to look into this almost the fairy-tale world.
The artists take part intensively in the exhibition activity representing their works in Ukraine and abroad. The pictures of Olha and Andriy beautify many of the private collections. At the previous exhibitions, the artists showed their sacral art masterpieces mainly. This year exhibition is special since the authors have devoted their attention exclusively to the Ukrainian female image here. The mode of the life details, the embroidery ornaments, the head wear are represented not as the elements of the folklore but as the decorations of the fairy-tale scenes.
Due to the exquisite compositions and the rich adornment, every of the artists’ works radiates the feeling of a feast. This is the feast of the everyday existence when the ordinary meetings and the obligations are being filled with new meaning and are getting the different tone. The artists succeed to turn the ethnographic subject-matters into the existential thought, that is why the female portraits are being turned into the allegories of the life path.
