Another Ukrainian artist who just popped into my search isIRENAEUS YURCHUK.
He
was born in Ukraine during World War II and raised in Upstate New York. He moved
to New York City to earn an Architecture degree from The Cooper Union and
graduate degrees in Urban Design and Planning from Columbia University.
He
has participated in group exhibitions in North America and Europe, and his
works are held in private collections in the US and abroad.
He
worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art
full-time.
Much
of his new work is a response to Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine.
(Paining to left: "Kharkiv Forever")
“Over
the years my work has evolved to combine multiple-image photography with
drawing and painting, using a variety of digital editing and physical montage
techniques. This includes adjusting inkjet images by applying acrylics,
watercolors, pastels, markers, colored pencils together with selected collage
materials to achieve a desired effect.”
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The Ukrainian Institute of America states: The
dense matrix that occupies Irenaeus Yurchuk’s paintings appears both
constructed and organic. Like the cultural and historical architecture they
evoke, these vague photomechanical records have grown from some originating
seed into a pulsating mass whose boundaries are indeterminate and fluctuating.
While his approach is characterized by a modernist recombination of
photographic fragments into wholly abstract combinations, Irenaeus Yurchuk
augments his surfaces with chromatic paint media and other materials to
engineer a detailed diagrammatic figuration. The final effect proves a stunning
pastiche of image, pattern, color and texture.
Painting to right is :”Angel of Kharkiv”
Irenaus' son DORIAN YURCHUK was born in 1970 in New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, while also attending classes at the New School for Social Research and at Harvard University.
In 1998, Dorian was awarded the degree of Master of Architecture, History and Theory Option, at McGill University. His current research centers around the link between laughter and healing, as evidenced in sources such as Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel and Joubert's Traite di Ris. Dorian's travels have taken him from Anchorage to Kharkiw, and he has difficulty staying indoors. He now works at an architectural restoration firm in New York City where he beholds, probes and reconstructs facades for a living.
In contrast to his father, Dorian Yurchuk develops rituals, creating objects, reliefs and
illustrations that operate between painting and sculpture, and further
establish new realms for visual exploration. Multilayered in their direct and
indirect intents, these works are resonant with Yurchuk’s occupational and
perceptual past, incorporating objects and remnants from the building trade and
using these elemental materials to create works imbued with a poetic spirit
residing between order and chaos, creation and destruction.
Dorian’s grander two-dimensional compositions are
created as turbulent renderings by an inveterate outdoorsman responding to
topographies from above and below.
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