Exhibition view

From May 16, the National Art Museum of Ukraine will host a large exhibition project dedicated to the work of the brightest experimenter of Ukrainian avant-garde Olexandr Bohomazov. The exhibition will not only present the most complete version of Bohomazov's heritage based on selected works from museums and private collections of Ukraine, but also a significant layer of preparatory works and sketches. For the first time, sketches and pictures, along with theoretical developments, will be exhibited as a complex. Also, the audience for the first time in nearly 90 years will see the restored painting "Sawyers".

The original creative style of Olexandr Bohomazov was formed in 1913-1916 during his work on theoretical papers "Painting and Elements" (1914), "Thoughts on Art" (1915-1916), devoted to finding answers to the questions: how an artist and a spectator can understand one another, what artist should know so that the picture caused exactly that emotions of the viewer that felt the artist, how usual techniques, present on the surface of a sheet of paper or on canvas, embody a tambourine bell, a neck of women's heels in the Kyiv streets and the smell of flowers in the boyar forests.

Short, but rich, the time of practical and theoretical exploration of the artist embodied in the original creative style, which was determined by the "firm" internal dynamism of various picturesque forms, developed in the direction of further formalistic experiments and in the most radical of them stepped beyond the boundaries of inferiority.

The central part of the exhibition is dedicated to the pictorial cycle "The Work of the Sawyers" (1927-1930), Bohomazov's software work, in which the author most fully revealed his theoretical and practical achievements. The artist managed to create two paintings of the cycle - "Sawyers" (1927-1929) and "Levelling the  Saws" (1927). The second work for about a century was in a ruined state in a closed "special fund" of the museum, its restoration lasted almost three years. The third painting "Rolling a Log" (1927-1930) did not have time for the artist to finish through premature death, but we know about it from numerous sketches, which will also be presented in the exposition.

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