NEW YORK – The Ukrainian Museum is presenting а comprehensive exhibition featuring the work of Zenowij Onyshkewych (born 1929), a prolific Ukrainian American artist, whose oeuvre includes a wide range of media spanning 60 years of creative expression. The exhibition comprises more than 70 paintings and drawings selected by guest curator Olena Martynyuk, Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University.
“Sixty Years an Artist: A Retrospective Exhibition of Works by Zenowij Onyshkewych” opened on September 30, and will remain on view through January 17, 2016.
The Ukrainian American artist turns an encounter with landscape into poetic expression and personal sentiment. Numerous paintings by the artist evoke and develop the romantic function of the landscape: its capacity to express human emotions, most notably the sense of belonging, nostalgia, melancholy, or trepidation when confronted with the forces of nature.
At the same time, Mr. Onyshkewych’s oils and watercolors illustrate his fascination with such Impressionist questions as the reconciliation of the immediacy of perception with the speed and forcefulness in rendering a scene, Japanese influences, and authorial presence through the intentional visibility of the brushwork.
This retrospective exhibition primarily showcases his landscapes, but also includes portraits and caricatures executed in oils, watercolors, and ink or pencil.
“Norwegian Landscape” (1996, watercolor on paper, collection of Julian and Maria Baczynsky).
An assessment of Mr. Onyshkewych’s creative heritage is an evolutionary consequence of a complex personal history — that of a Ukrainian immigrant absorbing the European painting tradition through a strong American lens. Mr. Onyshkewych himself is a vivid embodiment of the impact that the cruelty of the 20th century, with its displacements, wars, ruptures and losses, has had on human fate. After witnessing the terrors of the second world war as a teenager in Poland, Austria and Germany, young Zenowij relocated with his family to the U.S. in 1949.
Settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Onyshkewych began taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. His teacher was Reginald Marsh, through whom the young artist connected to the tradition of American urban modernism. Mr. Onyshkewych may well be the last living student of Reginald Marsh, one of the best-known chroniclers of 1930s and 1940s New York.
“Portrait of Cardinal Slipyj” (1966, pencil on paper).
While Mr. Onyshkewych was never fully devoted to urban visuality and street scenes, he reacted to this aesthetic through the dynamic energy and exuberant brushwork in his paintings. After the Art Students League, Mr. Onyshkewych moved on to study at the National Academy of Fine Arts with Robert Philipp, an American Impressionist.
Drafted to serve in the Korean War, he completed his education upon his return by enrolling at Pratt Institute. There he grew more attracted to observing nature directly and spent more time working in oils and watercolors en plein air rather than in the studio. The artist explored further the Impressionist intricacy of the painting surface, and began to experiment with subtle nuanced colors and evanescent light effects. Growing inwardness, fascination with earlier epochs in art, and a general anti-modernist stance are hallmarks of his work and were not uncommon for someone who survived two wars – one as a youth and the other as a soldier.
Ukraine’s First Lady Maryna Poroshenko accepts a gift from Zenowij Onyshkewych of one of his paintings during the opening of his solo exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum. Pictured in the center is Renata Holod, president of the museum’s board of trustees.
Besides welcoming Impressionistic traits, Mr. Onyshkewych underlines the interconnectedness of human beings with nature, juxtaposing tiny human figures with grandiose natural scenes. His figures in the landscape, rendered with just a few brushstrokes suggest the feeling of being overwhelmed by events and memories of the times long gone.
Mr. Onyshkewych’s work is found among prestigious American and international collections, including the Vatican, where he painted a life-size portrait of Pope Paul VI commissioned by Patriarch Josyf Slipyi for the official papal residence. Mr. Onyshkewych’s caricatures and other drawings, paintings and editorial illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The National Observer, Reader’s Digest and publications for St. Martin’s Press, McGraw Hill and Random House, just to name a few. He taught life drawing and painting at Fairfield University for nearly 20 years.
A 57-page, full-color illustrated, soft-cover catalogue titled “Sixty Years an Artist: Zenowij Onyshkewych. A Retrospective Exhibition” accompanies the exhibit. The essay by the guest curator, Olena Martynyuk, and the checklist are bilingual (English and Ukrainian).
The Ukrainian Museum is located at 222 E. Sixth St., New York, NY 10003; telephone, 212-228-0110; e-mail, [email protected]; website, www.ukrainianmuseum.org.
Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and students, free for children age 12 and younger.
“Old Bridge to Rockaway, N.Y.” (1969, watercolor on paper, included in the American Watercolor Society’s 101st annual travelling exhibition).