ETCHINGS AND ENAMELS OF OKSANA STRATIICHUK

Triptych-Art Gallery, Imagine point
Triptych-Art Gallery
Date: 07.12.2024
Address: st. Desyatinna 13, Kyiv, Ukraine
Country, City: Ukraine, Kiev
ETCHINGS AND ENAMELS OF OKSANA STRATIICHUK, Imagine point
Triptych Art gallery in Kyiv presented a personal exhibition of ukrainian artist and graphic artist Oksana Stratiichuk.

In 1992, she graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute (now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture), Faculty of Graphic Arts, workshop of free graphics (teachers: A. Chebykin, M. Kompanets, V. Serhieiev). She completed an internship at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts under the guidance of H. Yakutovych. Main techniques: etching, lithography, mokulito, enamel.
Lives and works in Kyiv.

The exhibition includes etchings from the series “Universal Landscape” created in 2022-2024. This series deals with universal and timeless manifestations of nature. In her new etchings,
Oksana Stratiichuk captures the essence of the landscape, overcomes specificity and focuses on the original elements. The plant theme in Oksana Stratiichuk's work is already well known to her loyal audience.

“The first flowers sprouted on paper in a series of still lifes in the late 1990s. From mixed compositions combining fruits, plants, and figures, Oksana moved on to floral still lifes in the spirit of the Dutch masters of this genre. The baroque splendor of bouquets in the next series of works is replaced by the refined elegance of Japanese gardens. Juicy flowers-fruits, corporeal and tangible in the series of still lifes, give way to plants-symbols, artistic generalizations of the image of a flower, which are intended purely for aesthetic and philosophical contemplation.” – Ivanna Stratiichuk.

The combination of such baroque and at the same time restrained elegance with a Japanese accent has become the artist's trademark. She has developed her own line in graphics, characterized by a contradiction between majesty, texture and splendor, and on the other hand, a sophisticated development of drawing details and colors. In addition to her aesthetic fascination with Japanese graphics, Stratiichuk has also been conducting creative research into the mokulito technique, an original Japanese method of flat-printing, in recent years. The artist was the first to introduce this technique into contemporary Ukrainian printmaking.

As art historian Kateryna Lypa accurately characterized this combination, “the artist's works quite clearly show a kind of zen buddhist approach to the process of contemplation of things, and thus to the image: when in one flower you see all the flowers of the universe and the universe itself, and a drop of water contains all the rains and all the oceans. In the artist's works, zen meditation is organically combined with the european graphic tradition.”

According to the organizers of the project, the artist's works, which skillfully balance on the edge of the abstract and recognizable, evoke a sense of the harmony of nature, its beauty and generosity, its repetition, which tends to infinity. Works in the hot enamel technique organically complement the series. Oksana Stratiichuk covers the printed copper molds from her stamps with enamel, turning them into independent artworks. The combination of the artistic properties of the etching form with the changing translucent colors of the enamel, as well as the unexpected effects and textures that arise when working with both techniques, creates a unique visual variety within each individual work.

The author of the text –

art critic and art manager of the Imagine Point gallery

Tetiana Safir

 

 

Loading, please wait...