ukrainianmuse

7 October 2023 – 7 April 2024

For over 60 years, Maria Prymachenko created art based profoundly on her Ukrainian upbringing and wildly creative imagination. Despite having no formal art training, Prymachenko over the years was able to create a wide range of art: drawings, paintings, ceramics, illustrations, and even embroidered garments. She was known during her lifetime for her brilliantly colored and inventive scenes of animals – lions, bears, birds, horses, and strange behemoths – covered in riotously hued, almost psychedelic patterns. Additional themes included traditional village life, the Ukrainian landscape, and flowers. Always drawing on village traditions and later dreams for inspiration, Prymachenko also included creative critiques about various dramatic social events in her work. During the mid and late 20th century, she was Ukraine’s most beloved artist; her artworks have appeared on stamps and even the country’s coinage.

This exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum will feature over 100 paintings, unique ceramic works, bespoke embroidered blouses, wooden plates, and several children’s illustration books. The exhibition will highlight Prymachenko’s creative talent and visionary outsider esthetics born out of a history of traditional Ukrainian village arts and crafts movements. This will be the first exhibition of Prymachenko’s art outside of Europe.

28 April – 3 September 2023

Janet Sobel is a rediscovered Ukrainian American artist who influenced the New York art world in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly after she began painting. 

Sobel (1893–1968) was born Jennie Olechovsky in what is now Dnipro, Ukraine. She moved to Brooklyn with her mother and siblings in 1908, shortly after her father’s death. At 16, she married Max Sobel, with whom she had five children. 

Sobel took up painting at the age of 44, in 1937. Her son Sol, an art student at the time, recognized his mother’s talent and promoted her work. Sobel’s early work often incorporated images and experiences from her Ukrainian childhood: the abundant floral motifs of Ukrainian folk art, traditional Jewish families, soldiers with cannons and imperial armies. Her main goal was visual intensity, which she attained with impressive regularity. 

The art collector Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel’s work in a 1945 group show called The Women at her Manhattan gallery Art of This Century; the following year, Sobel had a solo show at the gallery. 

Janet Sobel: Wartime is the first museum exhibition focusing on Sobel’s early work. Over forty-five drawings, created in the decade after she began painting in 1937, highlight her rise to much-talked-about and prominent artist. This important period in her artistic career positioned her to be part of the ground-breaking Ninth Street Art Exhibition (1951), which marked the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement with international influence. Sobel was one of only three women included in the show. 

But her fame did not last long. She was not easily categorized by the art world, and the media often referred to her as a mother and housewife first, then as an artist. While she initially received attention for being an outsider artist (self-taught), she was just as quickly forgotten for the same reason.  

Several recent press articles refer to Sobel pioneering the drip-painting technique made famous by Jackson Pollock. Her best-known work, Milky Way (1945), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was made a year before Pollock’s first drip painting, Free Form, which is also at MoMA. 

Sobel is said to have completed more than 1,000 works. This exhibition is organized from the private collection of  Gary Snyder. 

28 April – 6 August 2023

Lesia Khomenko is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist from Ukraine who since the Russian invasion has been the focus of global media discussion and attention. Her approach is to reconsider the role of painting: she deconstructs narrative images and transforms paintings into objects, installations, and performances. Her artworks have mocked Soviet Socialist Realism’s erroneous attempt to create a perfect utopian society and fantasy people, and she has probed past state-sanctioned creativity and its long-lasting impact on current artistic practices.

This exhibition, Khomenko’s first solo museum show in North America, reflects on the artist’s creative method and her incessant investigations of identity and politics, particularly in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine.  

Khomenko’s Count Down series reimagines prominent socialist realist battle paintings by Soviet Ukrainian artists. In her canvases, Khomenko eliminates the valorous figures of soldiers and military equipment, presenting instead a depopulated terrain. 

The large-scale works created for the Ukrainian Museum, particularly Radical Approximation and Fragmented Surveillance, grow out of the haze of war in cyberspace and quote the footage of military operations available online. These canvases resonate with earlier works where Khomenko depicts unidentifiable armed figures in the abstract manner, which investigates the protective technique of blurring and masking strategic objects, landscapes, and military faces in photographs from the frontlines.

The transportable, rolled paintings in the MPATS series capture Khomenko’s own experience of living through the early stages of war and evacuation, and witnessing warfare in real time, where arms fall under the category of collective needs and are held sway by collective usage decisions. (MPATS = man-portable anti-tank system) 

In her new body of work, AJS,Khomenko initiates a dialogue with the Abstract Expressionist painter Janet Sobel, whose early images are also on display at the Ukrainian Museum. The installation symbolically bridges decades of narratives that were fragmented and concealed due to forced migration, resocialization, ruptures, and survivals.