Glimmering Connections. Ukrainian Painting at the Turn of the 1990s and Today

Mystetskyi Arsenal (28–30 Ivan Mazepa St.) presents a new exhibition titled “Glimmering Connections. Ukrainian Painting at the Turn of the 1990s and Today”. The project will open on June 25. The exhibition will run until August 30, 2026.

Contemporary art has seen a noticeable return to painting. This project, therefore, proposes viewing painting as a space of continuous dialogue between artists of different generations and their ways of reflecting on Ukrainian reality in their work.

Curator: Oleksandr Soloviov
Co-curator: Ihor Oksametnyi

The exhibition brings together works by Ukrainian artists from two periods: from the second half of the 1980s through the first half of the 1990s, and from the last decade.

The connections between these two generations are glimmering: in some places they are clearly visible, while in others they remain speculative. Yet within this ongoing dialogue, one can always find echoes between approaches, gestures, works, and authors. Moreover, both then and now, painting has developed amid historical ruptures and upheavals.

Oleksandr Soloviov, curator:

“The impulse for this exhibition came from my conviction that over the past ten years, Ukrainian art has developed a clear tendency toward the return of figurative painting. In this context, it is no coincidence that we recall the surge of painting that took place here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was, so to speak, a professional witness to that process. It was then that the term ‘new wave’ emerged. Today, almost all works of that wave have settled into museums and private collections, many of them outside Ukraine. Contemporary viewers have either never seen them or have already forgotten them. That is how the idea arose: to show these two periods, these two phenomena — that which has already taken shape and entered history, and that which is only now forming but is no less vivid and significant — within a single exhibition space. By seeing these paintings together ‘here and now,’ viewers can ask themselves whether it is possible to speak of the development of contemporary Ukrainian painting, in all its diversity, as a phenomenon characterized by continuity and coherence.”

CURATORIAL TEXT

The dialogue between different generations and temporal experiences reflects not only the present’s engagement with the past, but also the interaction of eras themselves, in which each sheds new light on the other while simultaneously rethinking itself.

Ihor Oksametnyi, co-curator:

“Within this project, one of our key areas of focus was what we referred to as “rapid painting” — works created in one or two sessions, without traditional preparation or carefully planned composition, emerging instead as a direct, spontaneous gesture. Today, this approach to painting is becoming a way of speaking about the unspeakable. It requires no translation, no excessive verbal explanation, just as a suddenly heard musical theme requires none — it acts directly through physicality, color, rhythm, and above all, emotion. The artist does not describe an event; they live through it in the material act of creating an image. It is precisely the physicality of painting — its tangible texture, the trace of the hand, the overcoming of material — that turns the painting into a form of visual testimony to reality.”

The exhibition includes works that illuminate the context and key figures of the art scene of the 1990s, including Illya Chichkan, Vasyl Tsagolov, Oleksandr Rojtburd, Andrii Sahaidakovskyi, Oleksander Hnylytskyj, Oleg Holosiy, Valeria Trubina, Dmytro Kavsan, Maxim Mamsikov, Leonid Vartyvanov, Igor Gusev, Simon Stamatov, Volodymyr Yershykhin, Pavlo Kerestey, Oleksandr Klymenko, Sergiy Panych, Vasiliy Ryabchenko, Yuriy Solomko, and Myroslav Yahoda.

Alongside them are works by contemporary artists: Kateryna Lysovenko, Nikita Kadan, Kateryna Aliinyk, Lesia Khomenko, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Olga Stein, Anton Saienko, Yuriy Bolsa, Ivan Grabko, Ksenia Hnylytska, Ola Yeriemieieva, Lucy Ivanova, Katya Kopeikina, Olena Kurzel, Yuri Leiderman, Krystyna Melnyk, Roman Mykhailov, Marharyta Polovinko, Vlada Ralko, Karina Synytsia, and ​​Vasyl Tkachenko (Lyakh).

The exhibition will consist of seven halls of the Old Arsenal building.

Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal:

“This exhibition offers abundant material for reflection. For example, despite the apparent formal similarity of certain tendencies — huge, sometimes macabre canvases that seem to reject the other media of their time — how similar are these tendencies really? Do they share anything in common, and if so, what? Perhaps it is only a coincidental similarity of form rather than a shared phenomenon. Or perhaps some subtle social mechanism, common to both periods, is at work, producing this effect in art. Another question: why were there so few women among the artists emerging in the late 1980s, whereas today they constitute the majority? What has changed? In short, this juxtaposition of periods, phenomena, and approaches seems fascinating to me not only from a formal perspective but also from an analytical one.”

Among the key themes of “Glimmering Connections” are myth and apocrypha, the human figure within the landscape, transformations of the body, quotations from art history and cinema, the ephemeral and the real, and painting as a means of questioning itself. The exhibition deliberately avoids a clear boundary between the two periods, allowing time to lose its linearity.

The creators of the project do not seek to mend the gaps between generations; rather, they reveal them and create a space for further discussion.

The exhibition is open from June 25 to August 30, 2026
Working hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 12:00 PM–8:00 PM (ticket office closes at 7:30 PM)
On opening day, June 25, the exhibition will be open from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

The exhibition is supported within the MUSEUM FUTURES program, implemented by Mystetskyi Arsenal and Mystetskyi Arsenal Community, NGO, and made possible by RIBBON International.

❗ We care about everyone’s safety, so in case of an air raid alert, the exhibition will be closed. At this time, you can go to the nearest shelter. The exhibition will start working after the end of an air raid alert.