NEW YORK – Art at the Institute announced the start of its fall 2016 season with an exhibition of paintings by Ukrainian artist Serhiy Hai. The exhibition opened on October 14 with a reception for the artist; it will remain on view through December 11.
Curated by Walter Hoydysh, Ph.D., director of Art at the Institute, the exhibition will be the artist’s second solo show with the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA).
“Serhiy Hai: Paintings” will feature four groups of paintings depicting iconic motifs traditional to the canon of Western art: riders and horses, nudes, masks, and still lifes. The ideals represented are not motifs, as such – they are the medium for colors – colors that evoke the realities of infinite psychic depth, physical observation and associations with distant archaic ages.
The archaic in Hai, his relationship to Etruscan art and culture, is not exclusively a decorative-historic re-examination of that era. Rather, it testifies to the simpler array of colors, tones and forms that originate with the distant archaic. Mr. Hai frees himself from every form of strict academicism and Hellenism in order to carry on, with a contemporary sensibility, that early classic Greek tradition. There exists an inner connection between his chosen motifs – partly understood as symbols of a lost humanity (unidentifiable visages), partly as symbols of the mysteries of life on earth – and the forms that transmit them to us purely on the aesthetic.
By inherent practice, Mr. Hai is a formalist through and through, and, the School of Paris clearly plays on his pictorial affections. His process goes from inside to out, and the techniques of applied line, color and form are the central components with which he works. This trinity would be nothing but pure abstraction were the perceived symbolic motifs not wholly incorporated in it.
Mr. Hai was born in Lviv. He graduated in 1986 from the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, and is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. He has participated in exhibitions throughout Ukraine, Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. He lives and works in Lviv.
Exhibition hours are Tuesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m., or by appointment. For further information readers may contact Olena Sidlovych, UIA executive director, at 212-288-8660 or [email protected].
The Ukrainian Institute of America Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the art, music and literature of Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. It serves both as a center for the Ukrainian American community and as America’s “Window on Ukraine,” hosting art exhibits, concerts, film screenings, poetry readings, literary evenings, children’s programs, lectures, symposia and full educational programs, all open to the public.
Founded in 1948 by William Dzus, inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist, the Ukrainian Institute is permanently housed in the Fletcher-Sinclair mansion at 2 E. 79th St. and Fifth Avenue. The building is designated as a National Historic Landmark and is protected as a contributing element of the New York Metropolitan Museum Historic District.