The Dancer

Andrii Sahaidakovskyi (born 1957, Lviv) is a Ukrainian artist, a participant of numerous art exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad. He works in the field of painting and practices unusual techniques, embodying painting ideas on rugs, supplementing them with his own statements.

In 2012, Andriy Sagaidakovsky became the winner of the award of the First Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art ARSENALE AWARDS 2012 in the nomination “Discovery of ARSENALE 2012”. In 2015, he participated in the Polish pavilion at the International Biennale of Arts in Venice. But his appearance on the Ukrainian art scene took place much earlier, somewhere in the early 1990s, when his works appeared at Lviv and Kyiv exhibitions. Even then it was obvious that he was an original artist with his own themes (childhood, human marginality, loneliness) and characteristic handwriting. The artist considers Karl Zvirynsky and Roman Selsky, a legend of the Lviv artistic community, a student of Fernand Leger, to be his teachers. A turning point in his work was an acquaintance with the works of British artist Francis Bacon. Sagaidakovsky often calls life “here and now” the impetus for the creation of works: “I live here and now: here, where I have to do what impresses, irritates or pleases me — everything that affects me.”

The painting The Dancer (2003) is perceived today as a hint at the fragility of human life, the thin line between the comic and the tragic, the real and the imaginary, the “serious” and the “non-serious”.

Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal