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ESSAY
Through the Roar of Cosmic Cataclysms
On Fedir Tetianych’s Artistic Practice
by Tatiana Kochubinska and Tetiana Zhmurko
Untitled. (A collage on the Biotechnosphere.) 1980s. Cardboard, collage.
Fedir Tetianych’s (1942-2007) methods and stance in art are unique in their universalism. Tetianych came into his own as an artist within the fold of the Soviet system of values, accepting or criticizing its benefits and problems. Although his oeuvre engages with various global art movements and manifestos, his work cannot be confined to any single one of them. His fascination with scientific breakthroughs of the era underpins his intuitive and spontaneous sensibility, whereas his reflections on the technical progress have an almost tangible connection to the earth and folklore. This article attempts to analyze the multi-vector art practice of Fedir Tetianych as a cohesive biographical and creative experience; the political framework within which the artist existed did not preclude him from realizing his ideas.
“As an artist, I paint no matter what I’m doing, even if I’m just wiping my feet on a rag.”[1]
This quote comes from his last interview, recorded in 2006 by his wife Hanna Tetianych, which has acquired the status of the artist’s manifesto. This creative tenet can be read as negation of all norms and rules. It places Tetianych close to the international art movement Fluxus, hailing the quotidian as an event. The Fluxus artists did not differentiate between life and art, insisting that routine quotidian actions should be read as art events, and stressing that “everything is art, and everyone is capable of creating it.” Much like Fluxus, whose catalogue of art methods intermingled theatrical performances, gestures and actions, the legacy of Fedir Tetianych cannot be reduced to a single medium. Performativity is not only the basis of his actions or theatrical stunts in public spaces. It also provides the framework for his own interpretations of his paintings, graphic works and objects, that, according to the artist, were liable to constant transformations. The endless transformations of artworks constituted the essence of Tetianych’s art practice. Much like representatives of Fluxus and arte povera, Tetianych blended techniques and genres, appealing to absolute spontaneity and blurring the line between the quotidian and the lofty, “carrying art to the edges of life in order to verify the entire system in which both of them function.”[2] Tetianych himself claimed, “I believe my entire life to be one cohesive performance…”[3]
Fluxus emerged in opposition to the art system as a protest against its commercialization, but Tetianych’s works had a different provenance: he appeared and came into his own within the Soviet system, in the ill-defined breach between what was allowed, and what wasn’t. His works existed within the fold of the official Soviet culture, with its system of state commissions and exhibitions in which he actively participated. At the same time, Tetianych’s art did not fit the system’s ideological tenets, and thus was doomed to exist in the margins. This unofficial quality, or to be more precise, his alterity to staid official forms, has fostered Tetianych’s markedly extroverted behavior. His performances occurred in public spaces, some during official bureaucratic meetings of the Union of Artists of Ukrainian SSR, where he would show up dressed as an alien. For many artists of the time, the balancing act between state commissions and working in private only has become an inalienable element of their framework, an unavoidable fact of life. Existence in several divergent ideological dimensions at once was the reality of this era. Like many artists of the time, Tetianych’s works combined the official with the unofficial.
Another good example of this would be Valery Lamakh,[4] who experimented with abstract art at the early stages of his career, while employed as a posters editor at Mystetstvo Publishing, taking state commissions for monumental art, and, much like Tetianych, writing poems:
there are many paths
but only one path is the path of life
the path of freedom[5]
Biotechnosphere. 1984. Sign at the entrance to the village of Peremoha, Kyiv Region
These examples undermine the customary official / unofficial division, foregrounding the universal values (happiness, freedom, knowledge, eternal life) instead. In a way, personal philosophies emerged as micro-universes that the artists could escape into from the dogmatic world surrounding them. These micro-universes allowed the artists freedom, if only within their bounds. For Lamakh, the notion of Schemes allowed to explore the interrelation between the apparent (external) and the unmanifested (internal); taken together, they were a singular way of cognition. Tetianych chose an extroverted, markedly provocative path instead. His connection to the external world manifested in his extravagant behavior, costumes and exotic inventions.
The Era of Frypulia. 1988. Paper and tempera on cardboard
A blueprint of a Biotechnosphere on wheels. 1980s. Pencil on paper.
Over the years, Tetianych developed a behavioral model that can be defined as affirming alterity within the Soviet framework. In his Dialogues with Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov described the three types of artists within the fold of unofficial culture: the first are the artists persecuted by the authorities, subsisting on unofficial income; the second exists at the very bottom of the social ladder; the third are “the characters.” Ilya Kabakov inscribed himself into the third group, and Tetianych might be said to belong there too: “These figures double: ostensibly normal Soviet citizens, they present their works at unofficial exhibitions, draw what isn’t expected of them, sell their works where they shouldn’t, etc. … The very essence of being ‘a character’ lies in the separation of the two realities.”[6] Unlike Moscow, which had an extensive network of underground contacts and organizations, Kyiv made dissenting artists seem like run-of-the-mill eccentrics rather than unofficial actors. As Michelangelo Pistoletto wrote, “When a man realizes that he has two lives, an abstract one for his mind, and a concrete one which is also for his mind, he ends up either like a madman, who, out of fear, hides one of his lives and plays the other as a role, or like the artist, who has no fear, and who is willing to risk the both of them.”[7] Tetianych was just such an artist with no fear. On the one hand, he was a member of the Union of Artists, and, if his party characteristics were anything to go by, a model engaged citizen; on the other, he was obsessed with the idea of Frypulia and the creation of the Biotechnosphere of life eternal.
Frypulia was Tetianych’s central art project that emerged in the mid-1970s and gradually became a byword for the artist. It entails an aesthetic and philosophical system that is steeped in the idea of infinity and infinite bodies. The Biotechnosphere—a spherical capsule 2.4 m (8 ft) in diameter capable of supporting eternal human life on earth as well as in space—became the foundational notion of Frypulia. The artist described the notion as follows:
“I founded a new religion based on the belief that we, as representatives of the Homo Sapiens species, can be infinitely eternal, preserving the memory of feelings in its entirety, as a collective soul of everything living on Planet Earth. Thus, I created the doctrine of Frypulia. Frypulia is a code humankind radiates either as radio waves or as rays of light, containing all the data about it. It may be used to recreate humankind in any spot in space.”[8]
The notion of eternity and immortality, so central to Frypulia, unites Tetianych with the philosophy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cosmists, including Nikolai Fyodorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or Alexander Bogdanov, who sought to explore space in order to extend human existence.
Once we compare their cosmic ideas though, it becomes apparent that the differences outnumber the commonalities. Tetianych never wanted to transform the Earth and destroy everything living on it for the benefit of the future humankind. Neither did he want to drag everyone forcibly to heaven, unlike the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century. He saw himself as an inalienable part of the planet that had already provided everything necessary to create ideal living conditions. He proclaimed himself in possession of esoteric knowledge, but that knowledge was provided by nature, and he saw his destiny in harmonious coexistence with nature.
Tetianych’s works organically combine the “low” rural culture and its folkloric humor with the urban culture, rich in scientific and technological innovations. The real soil from which all living things on Earth sprout becomes fertile soil for Tetianych’s eccentric ideas, including the technological Biotechnosphere feeding off solar energy and working on “the radiation method”. Tetianych found most materials that he used in his objects—sticks, paper, ropes, etc.—on the ground. The soil, therefore, provided everything that was needed to create an instrument capable of granting immortality.
Tetianych built an early Biotechnosphere of found materials and installed it in his vegetable patch in the village of Kniazhychi, outside Kyiv. The frame of the spherical module was constructed of branches and wooden planks; it housed grids, byproducts of artists’ work, and found banal quotidian objects. The idea of found objects is important within the framework of Frypulia. Recycling and reusing serve the eternal movement of matter in nature, which, again, invites comparisons with arte povera (representatives of this Italian movement compared artists to alchemists and saw their goal precisely “in the discovery, the exposition, the insurrection of the magic and marvelous value of natural elements”[9]).
From the series Cities of the Future. Late 1970s – early 1980s. Watercolors and gouache on paper.
While most Biotechnospheres were artisanal, some were produced industrially. One was installed in the town of Popasna, Luhansk Region, in the east of Ukraine.[10] Tetianych created it as part of a state commission for monumental decorations of a railroad depot. It was cast in metal and put on rails, with the sign of Frypulia engraved on one side.
From the series Cities of the Future. Late 1970s—early 1980s. Watercolors and gouache on paper.
The notion of formatism, closely connected to “Frypulia,” emerged organically. “I invented the notion of formatism when sorting potatoes, larger and smaller, by size,”[11] the artist wrote. Formatism is derived from the word “format,” not “form.” This framework dictates that objects on the canvas should be arranged according to a certain progression or regression, smaller to larger, or vice versa. Tetianych applied the method in paintings, collages and installations.
He wrote that “infinity is the largest format. So is ‘Frypulia,’ the seemingly endless duration of human and pan-planetary life. The key module of this system, 2.4 meters in diameter, is the size of a Biotechnosphere.”[12] In essence, both formatism and Biotechnospheres are formal expressions of the philosophical idea of Frypulia, so densely interconnected that they have to be described as inalienable parts of one phenomenon. Tetianych’s paintings are based on the same principle. The artist approached a canvas with an emerging image as the soil sprouting plants. Moreover, he would occasionally add soil to his paints, creating grounded paintings and gradually progressing towards the idea of declaring soil his main canvas. This method was applied in many of his works, including the collage entitled “Human Being—Universe—Infinity.” In this work, Tetianych “formed” a female figure of cutouts from various newspapers and fashion magazines, mixing in sand and soil, coating it with paint and “dressing” it in a folk costume, complete with red boots. Like in many other works, Tetianych united ethnographic motifs with the data stream of his time.
From the series Cities of the Future. Late 1970s—early 1980s. Watercolors and gouache on paper.
From the series Cities of the Future. Late 1970s—early 1980s. Watercolors and gouache on paper.
The three Cossacks. Fedir Tetianych with his painting A Funeral Feast Over a Cossack Grave (1970s, oil on canvas). 1980s. Performance.
In his book, Tetianych wrote,
“The titans of painting covered their canvases with some sort of ground, which included sand. The rumors startled the uninformed me. Ground on a canvas?! Obviously, if you have ground, black soil for preference, something must inevitably grow on it (a lake, a windmill, and ye auld cherry orchard…). Having asked myself how thick this layer of soil on my canvas should be, I thought, why don’t I affix a canvas to the entire planet? This I did. I still have my work Planet Earth Affixed to My Canvas. Therefore, the Earth, affixed to my canvas, has stopped. It no longer moves through space. In that very moment, the Sun shifted from its position and started to revolve around the Earth, along with the infinite entirety of matter. Those who need that sort of thing are now welcome to use Planet Earth as an immobile anchor for all movement in the endless, moving space.”[13]
The first prefigurations of “Frypulia” go as far back as Tetianych’s early paintings of the late 1960s. The Cossack of the Zaporizhian Host Ivan Sirko (1966) and The History of Ukraine (the late 1960s) are of principal importance within the context. Both were created right after Tetianych graduated from the Kyiv State Institute of Arts. Tetianych depicted the Koshovyi Otaman (a chief officer of a unit of the Cossack army) of the Zaporizhian Host Ivan Sirko as Cossack Mamai, a magician Cossack and an important character Tetianych identified with. The seventeenth-century military leader Ivan Sirko is one of the most legendary figures in the history of Ukrainian Cossacks. After he organized about 50 victorious raids against the Turks with a small Cossack unit, people started to ascribe him magic talents, invincibility, and other superhuman abilities. In Tetianych’s painting, Sirko’s figure is foregrounded and pressed against the edge of the canvas. The figures behind him gradually grow smaller and turn into tiny dots. According to the artist, he applied the principle of formatism (of his invention) in this painting. Although the artist focused on folk traditions, Ukrainian folklore and history of Ukraine, including the Cossacks, during this period, the works of the time already treated humankind as a small part of the large universe. The artist went even further in his next work, The Mystery of the Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky (ca. 1970–2006), oil on canvas created together with his wife Hanna Tetianych and children Lada and Bohdan-Lyubomyr).[14] Formally approaching abstraction, the canvas yields figures and faces woven into a single historical ornament, evocative of the map of the starry sky, on more attentive viewing.
Style-wise, paintings of this period are strongly reminiscent of those of Pavel Filonov, the founder of analytical painting, and of his principle of “art forms growing organically, like a tree.”[15] Filonov’s principle (from the particular to the general) is fully in tune with Tetianych’s. Filonov believed that each work should contain not only the visible part, accessible to any person, but also the invisible, accessible only to the “inner eye” of an analytical artist. “The work’s organism should grow the way everything in nature does” [16] such is the foundational tenet of “the principle of the constructedness.”[17] Tetianych’s imagery grows organically on the canvas too, with the growth process as such, rather than the end result, being the primary factor.
According to the art scholar Halyna Skliarenko, the artists’ affinity is manifested primarily in their “will to learn the organic dimension of space, with their understanding and the dramatic sensuous experience of the connections between all its constitutive parts underpinning their works: elements and forms are not constructed but rather grow naturally, establishing links and interconnections.”[18]
In the works of Tetianych, the Universe, constructed as a collage of diverse elements, is reminiscent of Filonov’s Universe breaking down into atoms. And yet, the artists’ works contain fundamental differences, despite their formal similarities. Filonov prioritizes the rational, the analytical and the cerebral, whereas Tetianych relies on the sensuous, the intuitive, the elemental. Insofar as Filonov valued the principle of constructedness and completion, Tetianych prioritized the process as such. The artist believed that the work lived as long as it remained in flux, returning to his canvases throughout his life, using them in his performances, and often engaging his family and friends in the process. Filonov’s totalizing impulse required that everyone should be forcibly brought to a single correct method, and he completely negated all others. Tetianych meanwhile never sought to establish a school with well-defined boundaries: to the contrary, he was open to all manifestations and experiments. As an artist, he, as all-encompassing as the Universe, made the point of engaging with all methods he organically consumed.[19]
The History of Ukraine. Oil on canvas. 1966.
Mystery of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky (created in collaboration with his wife Hanna Tetianych and their children, Lada and Bohdan-Liubomyr). The 1970s—2006. Oil on canvas.
Tetianych’s works in general functioned as manifestoes. To promulgate his views, the artist vocally invited everybody to partake of his truth, becoming a prophet-teacher who, having learned the mysteries of life, shares them with his disciples. “Being not only an artist and an author of an artwork created in conjunction with the Glass Art Plant but also an international propaganda agent, I believe it my duty to implement continuous aesthetic education of the working masses through my works by explaining and interpreting their contents and meaning. They serve as primary decorations for the unfolding synthesis of the visual, aural, plastic, literary and philosophical arrangement of our environment,”[20] Tetianych wrote in 1974. It is hard to tell what is stronger in this statement: the undeniable irony or the influence of the utopian tenets of avant-gardists. Tetianych implemented this enlightenment ideal in his plans for a Factory Theater. The idea was conceived after he received a commission from the Artistic Glassworks Factory. Tetianych created the composition The Glass Blowers, decorating the entrance hall of the factory’s administrative wing. Tetianych approached the mosaic as an experiment. Besides colored smalto and glazed ceramics, he also used “byproducts” of glass production, including colored broken glass swept out of cooling furnaces, fragments of pressed products (vases, glasses, etc.), elements of various glass products (handles, bottle bottoms, etc.) and other glass waste. This led him to the idea of recycled materials that he actively adopted when working with refuse. The artist also wanted to refashion one of the workshops as a theater where the visitors would admire the workers toiling in unison. He went so far as to sketch out seating plans of the Factory Theater, an utopian project that never materialized.
They flee from theatres to factories for a breather
To see with their own eyes how muses toil in shops,
To admire their toil, connected
To sport, science, technology
Art and inspiration[21]
The Infinity Universe. Oil on canvas. 1970s.
Human Being—Universe—Infinity. 1980s. Paper, collage, gouache, whitewash, magazine and newspaper cuttings, photopaper, soil.
For context, Halyna Skliarenko quoted a proposal similar to Tetianych’s idea, voiced in 1974 from the podium at the united plenary session of the administration of creative unions and clubs of the Ukrainian SSR by Halyna Kalchenko,[22] the chairwoman of the administration of the Kyiv Organization of the Union of Artists: “Imagine a factory shop, a worker toiling at his workbench to beat the target. And what about the artist? He, too, toils alongside factory workers at his easel, pencil and brush in hand, instead of at a workbench. The results of his toil promise to bear fruit not only for artists, but also for the factory.”[23]
Tetianych thrived in the limelight and consciously constructed the image of a teacher-preacher. Despite that, he was a loner artist, individualist, spontaneous and unpredictable. His behavior seemed to embody Michelangelo Pistoletto’s notion that “predetermined directions are contrary to man’s liberty,”[24] affirming spontaneity and processuality as the lifeblood of art and life.
Tetianych was an eccentric genius, inventing and creating a new world radically divergent from the Soviet reality. For him, irony was the zone that allowed the artist to exist within the Soviet framework, attend party meetings and official exhibitions about revolutionary leaders.
“I persuade the sages and entertain the fools,”[25] Tetianych wrote in a poem. This line attests the duality of his identity: on the one hand, it demonstrates that the artist reflected deeply on the social reality, and on the other, it reveals that he found shelter from said reality under the guise of a clown or a holy fool. For Tetianych, laughter was one way of surviving the Soviet reality. Analyzing Gogol’s oeuvre as the most prominent manifestation of the culture of laughter in his article “The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol),” Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “…in Gogol the zone of laughter becomes the zone of contact. The contradictory and incompatible are combined here, and they come to life as a linkage.”[26] In Gogol, we see “the clash and interaction of two worlds: a completely legalized, official world, put in order through ranks and uniforms, vividly expressed in the dream of ‘life in the capital,’ and a world in which everything is funny and unserious, in which only laughter is serious. Incongruities and the absurd introduced by this world prove, on the contrary, to be true, unifying, inner principles of the other, the external, world. This is the gay absurdity of folk sources, possessing a multiplicity of speech correlations that are precisely fixed by Gogol.”[27] The Soviet system abided by strict bureaucratic rules, norms and laws, and each deviation from them could be strictly punished. Intensifying the absurdity, extreme as is, was the only way to fight the system. Therefore, Tetianych’s carnivalesque behavior and the mask of a fool were both a mark of the era and a guarantee of his continued existence. Tetianych was a pioneer of happenings in the history of contemporary art in Ukraine. His happenings were based on his individual, instantly recognizable, often provocative behavior, and relied on distinctive costumes he designed and sewed himself. For Fedir Tetianych, happenings became an inalienable part of life. Often spontaneous and ad hoc, they were mostly intuitive and evocative of ritual processions. Costumes played an important role. Tetianych sewed himself costumes of glistening fabric, tinfoil, cans and various found materials that made noises; this aural background augured the arrival of Frypulia. He liked walking on stints to tower over the crowd, and wore a shining helmet on his head. He recited his poems/messages in front of the crowd and chanted Frypulia! like a ritualistic incantation. All this affirmed the artist’s eccentric reputation. Tetianych drew the attention of everyone around him and underscored his difference from normal people, whom he sought to engage in the esoteric teaching of Frypulia, to which only the select few capable of sharing the mystery were privy.
Untitled. 1970s. Cardboard, collage, gouache, whitewash, magazine cuttings.
Untitled. 1970s. Cardboard, collage, gouache, whitewash, magazine cuttings.
In his classical work Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga maintained that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life.”[28] He defined play as “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious.’”[29] This is how Tetianych, too, conducted his free activity and played the role of a holy fool that made people forgive many of his missteps. Valery Lamakh wrote that the path of freedom is the only path of life, whereas Tetianych implemented the idea of freedom through play and disguises that created opportunities for freedom in the unfree society and allowed to transcend the boundaries of the predefined world. According to Huizinga, play transports to other worlds and different dimensions, which proved redemptive in the Soviet reality. Many artists of the time saw transportation as an escape, and prioritized physical transportation first and foremost, including emigration as an escape from ideological persecution. Tetianych, meanwhile, considered the possibilities of transportation without budging from one’s geographical position; for him, transportation was spiritual rather than physical.
The playful essence of Fedir Tetianych’s art method is pre-logical and pre-linguistic. There’s an entire corpus of the so-called “masks” he created of found materials (old worn boots, tin cans, wood, tinfoil, trash, books, textbooks, etc.) These works have something chthonic about them. By attaching all sorts of trash and garbage, mostly tin cans and scrap metal, to old wooden planks, Tetianych brought these objects to life, transforming them into ritual masks or ancient idols. For example, he pasted a colored paper application onto a giant balalaika case, giving it anthropomorphic qualities and making it appear as something animate. The artist turned all objects surrounding him into signs, often by stylized images of a face. All objects seemed to come alive with Tetianych animating them. In his object The Safe Deposit Robot, simplistic unwieldy materials are combined to create an anthropomorphic being. Tetianych’s early self-portrait is created in the same style.
Tetianych created abstract compositions in many notebooks and textbooks, adding faces to inanimate objects. A similar transformation (faces manifesting in the background) can be seen in ornaments of a hut in the village of Hintsi (Poltava region). Its ceiling, walls and oven are all covered in paintings, depicting mostly faces with expressive, exaggeratedly large eyes reminiscent of icons. Tetianych transformed a banal village hut with his paintings, lending a sacred dimension to the quotidian interiors. Tetianych’s paintings and other works in village huts can be described as site specific, engaging with the given space and locality. Works of the sort can also be seen in his native village of Kniazhychi just outside Kyiv, where the artist created something akin to a family crypt in the garage. He created several bas-reliefs reminiscent of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, inscribing himself and his relatives (his brother, his niece, etc.) into the circle. The model’s name is engraved next to each portrait. These works stand out in Fedir Tetianych’s oeuvre in their intimate plastic sophistication. They are not intended for the wide audience that would need to be startled or provoked. This corpus manifests his inner life as such and is a product of authentic feelings that found expression in the hermetic space of a village garage.
Fedir Tetianych seemed to view his selfhood on the planetary scope, creating his self and constructing his identity in the framework no less than cosmic:
“In my consciousness, I saw the Planet Earth in its entirety, the Sun, other planets and galaxies, and among them myself, ostensibly enlarged to size or made infinitely minuscule in my infinity.”[30]
A Module for Locomotion. 1990s. Xerox copy, collage.
A Milk Carton Woman. 1980s. Cardboard, paper, newspaper cutout, milk carton, walnut shell.
Icon. 1986. Canvas, tinfoil from milk packs and candy, gold paint, pencil.
Painting in the interior of a village house. The village of Hintsi, Poltava region. 1986–1987.
Tetianych’s art method enfolds various eras and contexts. It contains the chthonic essence while also reflecting on the technical innovations of his time; it is deeply rooted in the folk culture and literally in the earth while referring to practices and theories of the avant-garde. All these ideas and references seem to intermingle, culminating in the concept of Frypulia. The idea of transportation is foundational for Tetianych’s works. Performances served as a juxtaposition to the Soviet reality, and transported the artist to a different reality; Biotechnospheres presuppose physical transportation and overcome all political and ideological boundaries; to top it all off, the general concept of Frypulia invites the viewers to acknowledge the humankind’s endless potential:
Learn to see, feel and understand
Everything as an extension of your body.
Tell yourself that
There’s nothing but me in infinity
There’s nobody to blame.[31]
Translated from Ukranian by Iaroslava Strikha.
All images are provided by the Research Platform of the PinchukArtCentre. Courtesy of the Fedir Tetianych Family Archive.
About the Authors
Tatiana Kochubinska is an independent curator, writer, researcher, and lecturer. She has been the curator of the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv for seven years, where she developed its Research Platform aimed at creating the digital archive of Ukrainian contemporary art. In her curatorial practice, Kochubinska is interested in the questions of responsibility, Soviet history, its relation to today’s society and the psychological state of the individual time and again flashbacking the personal memories of the cross-border 1990s. She co-curated the international Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv and Future Generation Art Prize@Venice as a collateral event within the 58th Venice Biennial in 2019. In 2020 she co-edited the special issue Euphoria and Fatigue: Ukrainian Art and Society After 2014. Tatiana edited and compiled the books “The ParCommune. Place. Community. Phenomenon” (2019) devoted to the squatting group in Kyiv of the early 1990s and co-edited “Fedir Tetianych. Frypulia” (2022). In 2023 she worked at the Dresden State Art Collections and co-curated the exhibition “Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories. Ukrainian Art 1912-2023” at the Albertinum Museum followed with a public programme, a video-course of lectures as well as the catalogue published in partnership with De Fundatie Museum in Zwolle.
Tetiana Zhmurko is an art historian and researcher. She is the head of the research department of art of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries of the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Her research interests include the history of Ukrainian modernism, the art of the 1970s–1990s, and the creation of an archive of Ukrainian modern and contemporary art. She was an associate researcher of the PinchukArtCentre’s Research Platform, where she wrote scientific articles, interviews, created artists’ profiles, contributed to “The ParCommune. Place. Community. Phenomenon” (2019) publication, and co-edited “Fedir Tetianych. Frypulia” (2022).
[1] Tetianych, Fedir. “Frypulia – mii vichnyi dim, moie neskinchenne tilo. Chastyna I.” Artania. № 9 (2009): pp. 65.
[2] Harrison, Charles. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 875.
[3] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 4.
[4] Valery Lamakh (1925–1978) was a Ukrainian Soviet artist known primarily for his aesthetic and philosophical treatise The Book of Schemes (Knyha skhem) that he kept working on throughout his life. He worked in monumental art and political posters, combining his career as an artist with teaching.
[5] Lamakh, Valery. Knigi skhem. KyivL Art Knyha, 2015. Vol. 1, p. 270.
[6] Kabakov, Ilya, Boris Groys. Dialogi. Vologda: Vologda, 2010, p. 29.
[7] Harrison, Charles. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 873.
[8] Tetianych, Fedir. “Frypulia – mii vichnyi dim, moie neskinchenne tilo. Chastyna I.” Artania. № 9 (2009): p. 64.
[9] Harrison, Charles. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 898.
[10] The sphere did not survive.
[11] Tetianych, Fedir. “Frypulia – mii vichnyi dim, moie neskinchenne tilo. Chastyna I.” Artania. № 9 (2009): p. 65.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 4.
[14] The work’s ultimate variant differed significantly from the original idea.
[15] Kovtun, Evgeny. “Ochevidets nezrimogo. O tvorchestve Pavla Filonova.” In Pavel Filonov i ego shkola. Pavel Filonow und seine Schule [Materials of the exhibition, September 15—November 11, 1990, Düsseldorf], ed. Evgeny Petrov and Jürgen Harten. Koln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1990, p. 18.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Cf. “принцип сделанности” in the original Russian.
[18] Skliarenko, Halyna. “Fedir Tetianych: ostannii polit.” Obrazotvorche mystetstvo № 4, 2007, p. 15.
[19] It was never established conclusively whether Tetianych’s style was directly influenced by Pavel Filonov, whose works had been prohibited in the Soviet Union. It is very likely, given that Filonov’s “rehabilitation” fell on the latter half of the 1960s, when Tetianych came into his own as an artist. Filonov’s first postwar exhibitions were held in Novosibirsk in 1967, and in Leningrad and Moscow in 1968. A recent graduate of the art institute, Tetianych often visited Moscow in those years. Be that as it way, the formal and stylistic parallels are too striking to altogether ignore Tetianych’s possible exposure to the works of Filonov.
[20] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 27.
[21] Ibid., p. 29.
[22] Halyna Kalchenko (1926–1975) was a Ukrainian Soviet sculptor. The People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1967).
[23] Skliarenko, Halyna. “Fedir Tetianych: ostannii polit.” Obrazotvorche mystetstvo № 4, 2007, p. 15.
[24] Harrison, Charles. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 876.
[25] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 14.
[26] Bakhtin, M. M. “The Art of The Word and The Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol’).” Soviet Studies in Literature, 12:2, 1976: 36.
[27] Ibid., p. 37.
[28] Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949, p. 8.
[29] Ibid., 13.
[30] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 9.
[31] Fedir Tetianych. Kyiv, 2009, p. 16.
