The photo album of “The End of Spring”
2018
Recently, ArtHuss published a photo album of the works by the artists Oleg Tistol and Sergei Sviatchenko created as part of a joint special project “The End of Spring” and exhibited at the third international festival of contemporary art KYIV ART WEEK on 23-27 May 2018.
The edition is made in Ukrainian and English, it contains more than a hundred pages of full-colour and black-and-white photographs. Having opened the photo album, one will be able not only to get acquainted with the works of the project but also to see the whole process of mounting the exposition and placing artworks in the interior.
As one of the organizers of the project, art historian, curator Igor Abramovych notes in the preamble to the photo album, “The End of Spring” project is a product of a strange coincidence, as well as the skills and efforts of the true professionals in the field of fine arts”. The curator recalls that the friendship of Oleg Tistol and Sergei Sviatchenko goes back to the tumultuous era of the late 1980s, when large international shows of young artists were gaining prominence in Kyiv, with Tistol as one of the most striking participants, and Sviatchenko a participant as well as organizer. “The unexpected, yet dramatic cultural upsurge at the watershed era of tectonic historical shifts gave a starting impulse to proliferating phenomena and processes in contemporary Ukrainian art, increasingly more meaningful and original, – Igor Abramovych writes. 30 years have passed since then. During this period, the two strong artists went on separate, distinct trajectories, developing in different countries and under different circumstances, without ever crossing paths. And yet, during a meeting that finally took place in 2017, they discovered that they were like-minded enough, with the mutual understanding underpinned either by their shared distant past of the turbulent 1980s, or by the vibrancy of the dynamic present.”
That is why, that two artists first met in the same artistic space for the first time in three decades, “The End of Spring” is a kind of result, a reflection of experience, contemplations and worldviews of two self-sufficient and very talented artists about our past and present, about values and metamorphoses of human existence. There is an expressive conceptuality, a multi-faceted symbiosis of ideas and symbols, unexpected emotional views and author's accents. It's a frank, barely nostalgic dialogue across the years filled with metaphors and allegories, forebodings and predictions”, – co-founders of the Art & Culture Foundation Brovdi Art and co-organizers of the project “The End of Spring” Robert and Nataliya Brovdi noted in the preamble to the publication.
Art critic and curator Nataliia Matsenko, analysing the project, notes: “Combined by the global perception of the very fabric of our time in everyday realities, a careful attention to their aesthetics, an indescribable interest in the myth, which “on the intersection of eternity and modernity” can be revealed by the simplest technique of collage – Tistol and Sviatchenko succeeded to create “under the slogan of art” something true, unexpected, marked by a deep penetration into the hidden contents of human historical being.”
Robert and Nataliya Brovdi add, that thanks to the project “the Ukrainian art environment rediscover Sergei Sviatchenko and his original, world-class recognized technique and philosophy of collage once again. Instead, Sviatchenko himself actively returns and integrates into national art space. And not just coming back, but together with his friend and creative partner Oleg Tistol, he introduces a powerful aesthetic and intellectual tendency in the context of the contemporary art of Ukraine.”
In general, according to their words, we believe that “The End of Spring” is just the beginning of a new stage of the collaboration between Tistol and Sviatchenko. Meaning that, in the future, new works and art projects of this bright creative tandem lie ahead of us.
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