NEW YORK – With a successful exhibition season coming to a close around the observances of the Easter holidays, Art at the Institute presented a unique viewing experience in topical artistic exploration by one of Ukraine’s most prolific contemporary art practitioners, Petro Bevza.
Titled “Jordan,” the exhibition of new paintings by the Kyiv-based artist explored ethereal metaphysical imagery straddling the spiritual and real worlds in which all humankind deliberates, lives and breathes. Securing a key element as his investigative cue, here, the River Jordan resounds as a frequent symbol in art, music and literature. The artist’s latest project investigates the diurnal grasp of life’s celebration of the here and now and in the realm of the sublime. He does not attempt to specifically subscribe to a limited cultural affinity, but explores the concerns of all humanness.
Curated by Walter Hoydysh, director of Art at the Institute, the exhibition opened on March 18 and remained on view through April 13. This was Mr. Bevza’s first solo exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of America. A fully illustrated catalogue with investigative essays by Volodymyr Gorbatenko and Oleh Sydor-Gibelinda was published on the occasion of “Jordan.”
Pavlo Terekhov
Petro Bevza (left) with (from left) Inna Bevza, Olena Sidlovych (executive director of the Ukrainian Institute of America) and Walter Hoydysh (director, Art at the Institute).
Mr. Bevza’s career-long interest has been in decoding reality as a place of constant and inevitable change, and in realizing abstract ideas through the exploration of sometimes everyday, at other times mythical, objects and situations. Instead of depicting stable, conventional physical spaces, he often sets up specifically defined formal situations that play with the viewer’s sense of surface and depth, instructing one to see beyond the under-examined aspects of everyday and ethereal surroundings in startling news ways. His depiction of an immediate, often intimate spiritual moment, or figure’s or object’s presence, laced with an implied yet open-ended narrative, leads to a transcendent idea in spite of the intended rendering of his imagery.
Horses, peasants, angels and saints, fountains, vines and flora all emanate from a field of the Hegelian “other,” and play to the artist’s self-understanding of this bridge from the material to the divine. The current series is also populated by the conceptual notion of “The Vine – Domus Aurea,” to which the artworks are inseparable from the Ukrainian icon’s image of “Christ the Vine,” that appears in life-giving sprouts, leaving hope for an eternal revival. With “Jordan,” the viewer is offered the gift of the artist’s profoundly crafted exploration and realization of one of the most impressive ceremonies of the Byzantine rite: the solemn blessing of the water on the Feast of the Epiphany commemorating Christ’s baptism in the River Jordan. Water, the central theme, is the everyday element, the essence, if you will, through which faith is always present, manifested by inner spiritual renewal. For the artist, this holds true to be a direct meditation on what it is to aspire to being fully and truly human.
Panels from the “Domus Aurea” groupings outline simplified vessels, fountains, vines, mythical beasts – all iconic to life’s core persistent rejuvenation and narrative. Water is a symbol of salvation, life-giving energy and self-reproduction that appears through and through in Mr. Bevza’s “Fountains” series. Water also connotes cleansing in Ukrainian folk traditions; it is a symbol of a certain longevity, renewed feelings and emotions, an irresistible force.
“To Light ХІІ” (from the “Jordan” series, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 х 70 centimeters), a mid-sized painting, depicts a figure – construed as the appearance of the Holy Ghost, an angel, or even a gowned peasant – right arm extended and left hand on the heart, beyond the gaze of the viewer toward the celebration of the divine. A dense, unrecognizable, abstracted field on which the figure is poised disregards time and place. This is the world of Mr. Bevza. Although he is not considered fully an abstract artist, figural and other referential elements are consistently found in his art. Some of his most potent subjects surround human and animal presence. These references occur even among the seemingly inexplicable traces that give his paintings their enigmatic aura. Mr. Bevza’s figures are not representational in the realist sense, nor are they usually depicted whole within a familiar grounding.
Petro Bevza, “To Light ХІІ” (from the “Jordan series”, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 by 70 centimeters).
The pictorial space created by the artist is original in that the empty spaces are at times more important than the filled ones, that is, absence is more significant than presence. The world Mr. Bevza offers, or rather suggests, never provides a visible resistance, or so little: its build is real. Mr. Bevza tracks down, obstinately and with obvious talent, a hidden secret between us the viewers and the subject, between the joys of seeing, the meanderings of visionary imagination, and those of immediate and distant spiritual memory. He lives at appearances’ breaking point.
Mr. Bevza’s world is both a secret and initiatory; he remains within the realm of transmutation not in length of time or in real space, but within the magical one of the canvas and his divine subjects. He beckons the viewer to a true awakening; he is the master for seeing and feeling better. It is with the beautiful, if not, marvelous ray of light that he enlivens our vision of salvation and renewal.
Born in the Kyiv region of Ukraine, Mr. Bevza graduated from the Kyiv State Art Academy. Since 1990, he has been a member of the National Union of Artists, and a member of the all-Ukrainian creative collective BZH-ART. Recent solo exhibitions of his artworks were held at N2N Gallery (Abu Dhabi), Nest Gallery (Geneva), Bezpala Brown Gallery (Toronto), Galleri Gamla Vaster (Malme, Sweden) and Bottega Gallery (Kyiv). Mr. Bevza lives and works in Kyiv and Vyshneve, Ukraine.
Following its debut run at the Ukrainian Institute of America, “Jordan” was to travel to White World Contemporary Art Center, Kyiv (May 12-June 2), Odesa Art Museum, Odesa (September 7-October 25), The Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art Museum, Kyiv (February 10-March 10), and the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, Lviv (March 18-April 17, 2017).
About Art at the Institute
Celebrating its 61st year, Art at the Institute is the visual arts programming division of the Ukrainian Institute of America. Since its establishment in 1955, Art at the Institute has organized projects and exhibitions with the aim of providing post-war and contemporary Ukrainian artists a platform for their creative output, presenting it to the broader public on New York’s Museum Mile. These heritage projects have included numerous exhibitions of traditional and contemporary art, and topical stagings that have become well-received landmark events.