Ivan Marchuk

Ivan Marchuk was born in Moskalivka ( Bilozirka commune , Kremenets County , Volyn Voivodeship , Republic of Poland ; now a village in the Lanovetsky District of the Ternopil Region ) into the family of a well-known weaver.

After graduating from a seven-year school, he entered the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts in the department of decorative painting, where he studied from 1951 to 1956 (teachers Karlo Zvirynsky , Oleksa Shatkivsky , and N. Sukachova). After serving in the army, he continued his studies at the Department of Ceramics of the Lviv Institute of Applied Arts , graduating in 1965 (teachers Roman Selsky , Danylo Dovboshynsky ).

From 1965 to 1968 he worked at the Institute of Superhard Materials of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine , and from 1968 to 1984 at the Kyiv Combine of Monumental and Decorative Arts.

Since 1984 - on creative work.

From 1989 to 2001 he lived in Australia , Canada and the United States . In 1990, Marchuk visited Ukraine and his first official exhibition took place in Kyiv at the State Art Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts (now the National Art Museum of Ukraine ).

Lives and works in Kyiv.

The artist's work includes about 5,000 works. He has held more than 150 solo and about 50 group exhibitions. The artist's studio is located in the heart of Kiev on Pushkinskaya Street .

In 1965, he found his own style of art in art, which did not fit into the patterns of socialist realism, and for a long time could not officially exhibit his works in the underground . For this he was persecuted and persecuted by the KGB .

Until 1988, the Union of Artists did not officially recognize the work of Ivan Marchuk, although he had more than 15 exhibitions in various cities of the former Soviet Union (the first exhibitions in 1979 and 1980 in Moscow).

In 1979, his works were presented at the first exhibition of Ukrainian nonconformist artists, organized by young representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora, in Paris (France), Munich (Germany), New York (USA), London (UK), where Roland Penrose , the authoritative art critic and personal biographer Pablo Picasso , drew attention to the unique style of Ivan Marchuk's paintings .

Only in 1988 Ivan Marchuk was admitted to the Union of Artists of Ukraine .

Introduced in the mid-1960s, the way of expressing one's own worldview was embodied in the polystylistic and polythematic cycle The Voice of My Soul, pervasive in the work of Ivan Marchuk, which varies with new stem branches-cycles throughout the creative path. According to stylistics, technique, color scheme, theme, the paintings are systematized into cycles: "Voice of my Soul", "Landscape", "Flowering", "Flowering", "Color Preludes", "Portrait", "Portrait", "New Expressions", "Still Life", "White Planet I "," White Planet II "," Dreams come from the shores "," Look at Infinity " [5] . The completed series in the cycle "Voice of My Soul" is "Shevchenko" with 42 paintings (1982-1984), for which he was awarded the National Prize of Ukraine named after Taras Shevchenko (1997) .

Ivan Marchuk is the founder of new styles in art, in particular "plantarism" (the artist jokingly gave this style to his style - from the words "weave", "plant": paintings seem to be created from balls of whimsical threads). Author's technique of image transfer - plantarism (from the dialectic "plant" - to weave, braid, weave): applying paint with thin colored lines, their interweaving at different angles, which achieves the effect of volume and glow. Such an image, balancing on the border of man-made and technological, due to the complexity of filigree execution and complexity is practically not subject to repetition . First used in landscape (1972). Subsequently, the term plantarism acquired the meaning of the author's creative method - the original system of worldview and its transmission on canvas, which is characterized by asymmetry of rhythmic contractions in color and strokes (strokes), metaphorical and symbolic, image deformation, which achieves the culmination of static stress; focusing on the themes of existence, human existence, its place in the world and the problems of self-knowledge.

The range of fine arts, passed through the prism of the original worldview system and extrapolated to the canvas, is phenomenally wide: from primitivism (with clear signs of archetype) to realism, hyperrealism of abstractionism, abstract expressionism, surrealism and abstract. Maneuvering proportions, rhythm, color, Ivan Marchuk creates in the subconscious and influences the subconscious.

Today, his paintings impress art critics in Europe, USA, Australia, he is invited to exhibit in the best halls in the world, and all this in contrast to the past persecution and persecution in Ukraine. Ivan Marchuk's paintings are stored in many collections around the world.