“Emerging Art in Ukraine”: talent, hard work, dedication

Emerging art of Ukraine is presented for the first time in the Ukrainian-English book Emerging Art in Ukraine. It was written by Lucia Bondar (the owner of CP Publishing, where the book is published) and Anna Avetova, curator, expert in contemporary art, founder of TUASHO art agency. 

Talent and curators

Ukraine is a country rich in talent with a developed system of secondary and higher art education. One could say that the domestic market is oversaturated with good masters. But at the same time there are not many state and private institutions where emerging contemporary artists can assert themselves. Moreover, the war year has created painful gaps in this sphere. 

Thus, the search for interesting 20-30-year-old artists, their support is a matter of personal interest for curators and gallery owners, aiming at the development of Ukrainian contemporary art. Anna Avetova is someone who studies this field with great interest, who knows how to find promising masters, and her taste can be relied on.  

What is the art by emerging artists?

The authors of the book have chosen the evocative word “emerging” to describe the subject of their study. Indeed, it is art in formation, emerging before our eyes (and the cover of the book with a reproduction of Taras Haida’s work perfectly conveys these meanings). 

26 people, 14 women and 12 men, were selected from a wide range of Ukrainian emerging artists. Surely this selection was not an easy one. What are the criteria? Here is one of them, and a very important one: “A fierce desire to search for new forms of creative expression, freedom and individualism characterise our project’s partisipants,” says Lucia Bondar. For Anna Avedova, what is extremely significant is that these people, who are just beginning their careers in art, have great potential. For her, the universal formula for success is: “Talent, hard work, dedication, desire, discipline, inquisitiveness, determination”.

The artists represented work in a variety of techniques, and in the book you will see:

• Painting
• Sculpture
• Textiles
• Photography
• Collage
• Objects
• Digital art

The stylistic range is also very wide: realism, magical realism, surrealism, pop-art, fauvism, expressionism, abstractionism and other directions. Separately, let us pay attention to the high picturesque qualities of emerging artists paintings – this is the strength of the Ukrainian art school in general and one of the leading trends in global contemporary art.

Entering the twenty-first century

Finally, let us talk about the emotional impact of the book. The works of the late 2010s – early 2020s are collected in the book, and it is impossible not to view them through the prism of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which pandemic Covid-19, which frightened the world so much (there are also works devoted to it in the album), pales in the face of.

This retrospective optic sharpens the senses, helps to see the naked nerve of Ukrainian modern art – which is much more serious, sharper and deeper than mere visual and formal experiments. Emerging female and male artists today – in the hot spot of space-time – create meanings and look into the future, laying the foundation for the new art of Ukraine of XXI century.