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24 OUR LIFE • December 2022 THE UKRAINIAN MUSEUM 222 East 6th Street, New York, NY 10003 www.ukrainianmuseum.org 2023 Preview: Nikifor The Lemko artist Nikifor (1895–1968) is considered one of the world's finest outsider artists of his time. Born with a hearing and speech imped - iment and orphaned during World War I, Nikifor was unable to commu - nicate with the people around him. He was initially treated like a misfit and ridiculed by the people of his hometown, Krynica. For most of his life, he found himself isolated both physically and emotionally. Art became an outlet, a focus for his life. The topics of Nikifor’s art include self-por - traits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Throughout his vast body of drawings, Nikifor interweaves clas - sic landscapes and memories. Each drawing offers a kaleidoscope of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Meticulous and lovingly rendered, his drawings range from those with the tightly wound tension of horror va - cui , where absolutely no space on the paper is without the hash mark of a pencil, to others that breathe with open space and create a different type of tension, leading to the question of what is missing. It is a unique and powerful approach to landscape imagery. Unmarked open areas appear to exert pressure on the forms found populating the page, as if a strong gust of wind or invisible field is in fact occupying space, un - seen to the viewer. Nikifor (born Epifanii Drovniak) gifted us with a visual index of a lifetime’s worth of visual in - formation, regurgitated and re - assembled in countless ways. Each drawing is a window of - fering a deeply internal vor - tex of forms and articulations rendered in watercolor, cray - ons, and colored pencils. For Nikifor, who was non-verbal, art-making was his communi - cation. Beginning with a 1932 exhi - bition in Paris, Nikifor’s art was displayed widely across Europe, as well as in the U.S., Brazil, and Israel. His first exhi - bition in Ukraine took place in Lviv in 1965, three years before his death. The exhibition scheduled to open at The Ukrainian Muse - um in January 2023 will include more than 150 works from the Museum’s collection. Curated by Myroslava Mudrak, profes - sor emerita of art history at The Ohio State University, the exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalogue to be published by Rodovid Press in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Museum has several exciting exhibitions planned for 2023, including a major exhibition of the works of Nikifor. View of Krynica / Вид на Криницю n.d., watercolor on paper / б.д., папір, акварель 8 ¼ x 12 in. (21 x 30.5 cm) Vadym Lesych Collection / Збірка Вадима Лесича UM 1985/46
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