The tenth major exhibition at the Lviv Municipal Art Center is Davyd Chychkan personal project “Ribbons and Triangles”. Davyd Chychkan reflects on the Ukrainian idea and Ukrainian identity and presents the visual aesthetics he developed for the future progress of Ukrainians. The exhibition will begin on February 4, 2022.
Davyd Chychkan
Ribbons and Triangles
The project Ribbons and Triangles was created by Davyd Chychkan in 2022. It reflects on the Ukrainian idea and the Ukrainian identity, presenting the visual aesthetics that the artist has developed for Ukraine of his dream. The artist insists that, unlike the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917 – 1921), modern Ukraine does not correspond to the Ukrainian idea culturally, socially and politically, because its genesis has been violated. In times when Ukraine, once again for its history, is under the threat of imperial occupation by Russia, the artist invites viewers to reflect together on the content of the Ukrainian idea.
The key visual images of Davyd Chychkan’s new graphic series are ribbons and triangles, the colors of which have a symbolic meaning. The artist complements the yellow and blue colors of the national flag with purple, the color of feminism and cultural progressivism; with black, the color of anarchism and decentralism; and with red, the color of non-authoritarian socialists and direct democracy. Four ribbons, as well as triangles that are referring to the modernist works of Georgy Narbut, represent the idea of an alternative Ukraine, which the author seeks. Davyd Chychkan reminds that at the turn of the XIX-XX leftist ideas prevailed in Ukrainian intellectual circles, namely anarchism, revolutinary socialism, democratic socialism, social liberalism, and social democracy.
The Ukraine that the artist dreams about is a progressive, revolutionary, social and independent country; an unfulfilled modernist project, the ideological foundations of which were laid by Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka and other Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals. In the series of graphics that stylistically follows the aesthetics of the political poster of the late XIX and early XX centuries, Davyd Chychkan depicts an imaginary, alternative, lost or forthcoming Ukraine, which becomes an escapist refuge for him in times of neoliberalism and an exacerbation of the imperialist threat.
Davyd Chychkan (1986) is a Kyiv-based artist who has consistently developing a critical approach in art, turning his own artistic practice into an instrument for society’s transformation. He mainly works with such media as graphics, painting, street-art and performance. Among his personal projects are: Alternative Hryvnia (Artsvit, Dnipro, 2021), Portraits that Speak (Bereznitsky Art Foundation, Kyiv, 2020), The Lost Opportunity (Visual Cultural Research Centre, Kyiv, 2017), and During the War (ArtSvit Gallery, Dnipro, 2016). Recently, Davyd Chychkan has participated in several international projects, among which were exhibitions Between Fire and Fire: Ukrainian Art Now (Vienna, Austria, 2019), Biennale Warszawa (Warsaw, Poland, 2018), Permanent revolution (Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, 2018), The Kyiv International — Kyiv Biennial 2017 (Visual Cultural Research Centre, Kyiv, 2017), 5th Odesa Biennale of Contemporary Art (Museum of Modern Art MoOMA, Odesa, 2017).
The exhibition is be free to visit
from 10:00 to 21:00. Lviv, Stefanyka str, 11
Code on the gate 27