Ganna Gidora is a Ukrainian painter
Member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine (since 2006). Participant of exhibitions since 1985. Lives and works in Kiev. Born on 9.12.1959, the village Studenok, Sumy region. Studied (1978-1983) in Sumy Art Studio of Boris Borisovich Danchenko, which he considers his mentor in the art, continued education at the Fine Art Department of Kursk Pedagogical Institute (1981-1986). Participant and curator of projects of international plain-airs and symposiums. Till 2007 she taught and conducted master classes at the High School of Arts and Culture in Sumy.
Ganna Ghidora is a constantly looking for and improving artist with a complex vision of the world and sophisticated associations. She is fascinated by the eternal foundations of human existence, the life of nature and the relationship between man and his environment. During the first ten years of her creative career (1986-1996) the artist experimented with ceramics, stylising ancient forms, creating polychrome ceramic-plastic compositions inspired by the historical past. But her main field of activity is painting.
Having early on formed as a painter of certain subjects, and choosing oil and canvas as her technique, from the very beginning she has been striving to achieve generalized sounds of her compositions built on pale but rich ochre-greenish, grayish-blue, or golden-red tones. With time she continues delving into colour contrasts or harmonious flowing of white, pink, and turquoise-yellow sunny colours. The colour scheme in combination with the strongly pronounced linear and silhouette rhythm of the compositions becomes the main expressive means of the artist’s works.
Sharply different from traditional painting, her images inspired by her impressions of events, her original perception of particular places and landscapes, as well as her interest in archeology and the history of her region, have their own image logic and highly individual plastic system. They lack the usual real spatiality and subject matter, but the rhythm of coloured planes, juxtapositions of linear and silhouette plans and, finally, the manner of performance itself – expressive and pastose, with textured brush strokes. Within the composition itself these images create a particular rhythmical and colourful force field, which is perceived as the deep space of human feelings and moods.
The theme of the city, the saturated urban environment, being in it and correlating human feelings, emotions and memory have long possessed the artist’s imagination. Dealing with this theme, from creating architectural and landscape, recognizable, concrete motifs, she gradually moves to a more profound understanding of the city – the human home, created by centuries. In recent years the artist has focused more and more on the motifs of the eternal existence of nature, drawn to recreate a lasting, as if timeless, state of the earth’s firmament. Her desolate, naked and desolate landscapes, showing the powerful rhythms of the contours of gentle hills and the wide expanses of ancient steppes, the smooth, almost slow-moving curves of the rivers, recall the prehistoric era.
Ghidora also refers to philosophical juxtapositions of the eternal and the fleeting in earthly existence in her Land Art concepts. In her individual expression, the contemporary visual art movement called “land-art” that has received different titles (art in the environment, art of environment, forms in nature) becomes particularly acute and relevant in today’s context. The artist deals exclusively with natural objects and means, pursuing the aim to organically reveal the close interrelation of man, the natural environment and the changeability of the instantaneous in this environment. Showing contrasts between ancient, dazzling white mighty chalk cliffs and flexible green stems of tall marsh grasses quickly withering on their background the artist accentuates the “shadow of the moment” on eternity of existence, underlines dramatic transience and defenselessness of all life in the ancient system of our planet’s existence.
