Exhibition of Ukrainian artists «ACROSS BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES»
On February 24, 2022, two weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, in Zürich, Switzerland, the idea of creating a Ukrainian-Swiss foundation to support Ukrainian artists was born. The founders of the foundation are Ukrainian art dealer Hanna Humeniuc and Swiss architect Stefan Renner. Stephan Renner is a collector of contemporary art and an ardent supporter of Ukrainian contemporary art. The foundation got its symbolic name from the Ukrainian word KAPUSTA (Cabbage). This foreign word is visually and metaphorically familiar to everyone.
Already on March 19, 2022, the Cabbage Foundation in Sant Moritz in Chateau Papillon organized the first auction of works by Antonina Denisiuc, which gained a good resonance in the press and laid the foundation for the future of the foundation. Then, from April 12 to 24, the Parat Gallery in Zurich opened its doors for a personal exhibition of Antonina Denisiuc called "War Selfies».
June 1, 2022, The Cabbage Foundation is already expanding its activities in its gallery space at Müllerstrasse 45 in Zurich and presents to connoisseurs and collectors new names of Ukrainian artists in the group exhibition "Across Borders and Boundaries". Antonina Denisiuc is the Ambassador of the Cabbage Art Foundation in Ukraine and co-curator of the exhibition, together with curators Hanna Humeniuc and Stephan Renner. Here are the names of the authors: Mikhail Franzusov, Petro Starukh, and Petro Humeniuc, all artists are staying now in Ukraine, and Antonina and Ivan Denisiuc's collaboration project.
All artists (except Ivan Denisiuc) are representatives of one generation. These artists were born in Ukraine, which at the time belonged to the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They witnessed and actively participated in the resistance to the socialist system in the 1980s. Since the mid-80s and early 90s, the art of these authors has been an important lever in the formation of contemporary Ukrainian art, which was later recognized in the collections of national and European museums. All artists now are staying and working in Ukraine.
The most important indicator of creativity is the moment of geopolitical rupture, which was foreseen, occurred, and continues to be reflected at all stages by artists.
The exhibition will be held from 1.06 till 25.06 in the exhibition space on
Müllerstrasse 45, 8004, Zürich.
Vernissage 1 of June at 18:00
Opening hours: Monday-Sunday, 14.00 -18.00
Finnissage 16 of August at 18:00
Representative ARTISTS of the exhibition «Across borders and boundaries»
Michail Frnazusov
Michail Frnazusov was born on November 21, 1956, in Lviv. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Lviv Polytechnic and the cinematography department of the Film Faculty of the Theater Institute. I. Karpenko-Kary. He learned photography skills from his father, the well-known photographer in Lviv Mykhailo Ivanovych Frantsuzov. During his student years, he was a member of the club "Semaphore" at the House of Railway Culture.
Together with fellow architects, he created the group "Tower" at the Union of Architects, which is located in the Powder Tower on Pidvalna Street.
In 1980, seven photographers joined the band, including both amateurs and professionals. The Frenchman prepared collage posters, leaflets, and posters for the band's exhibitions in the USSR and abroad. Problems began in the Tower in 1984 because authorities noticed "apoliticalness" and "formalism" in the works of the participants. The work of the group was criticized, and Mikhail Franzusov was removed from the leadership.
Since the 1990s, Franzusov has retrained as a professional cinematographer. Since the early 2000s, he has been working at Lviv Polytechnic.
Michail Frnazusov’s name in the artistic context of Lviv is localized in the section of "unofficial photography" of the 1980s, which was one of the options for opposing the stamps of official Soviet photo aesthetics, and in the historical and cultural context of the gathering of informal intellectuals "Aksinin's Circle».
Far from the social accents and radical gestures inherent in the Kharkiv and Kyiv schools of photography, Frantzusov’s work of that time is metaphorically melancholy, immersed in his own conceptual poetics. In the early 2010s, the artist's photo archive was digitized by the Center for Urban History; digital copies are stored in the collection of the City Library of this institute.
Petro Staruch
He was born in 1961 in the village of Shershenivka, Borshchiv district, Ternopil region. Education: Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts. Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Since 1986, the artist has been actively involved in performances, international sculpture symposia, and biennials, art projects in Lviv, Kyiv, Jurmala, Tokyo, Sydney, New York, Munich, Rome. Since 2005 he has been working as a lecturer at the Department of Design of the National Forestry University of Ukraine. The sculptor is in the paradigm of his imagination of images, focuses his vision on the world around him, and transforms it into new forms. Works in the field of arts and crafts.
Petro Humenyuk
Artist was born in 1957 in Lviv. In 1985 he graduated from the Lviv Academy of Arts (then the Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts).1985-1986 - worked as a restorer at the National Museum in Lviv. 1988 - became one of the founders of the art society "Way" in Lviv.1998-2000 - the creation of the iconostasis of the Church of St. The Virgin of the Three Hands in Tallinn (Estonia), in particular, the image of the Virgin of the Three Hands, which is not very common in iconography.
«You will be surprised, but trying to understand the ethos of Peter Humenyuk's work, I was surprised by his social roles. Yes, they are social. What is the ethics here, when we try to understand the aesthetic values of the work of this artist - you ask. After all, painting is, above all, aesthetic in all its manifestations - even in the perverse - you say. So. But not completely. At the end of the nineteenth century, tired of the exhausting moralizing of academic art, artists went to the other extreme - trying to create art devoid of any social function - and thus trying to abstract from morality and its rigors - binding norms.No, they did not fall into immorality, but simply reduced it to zero. However, the horrors of the two world wars reminded us that the abyss of terror is near - that it is between us and even, according to Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905-1980), "inside us».Someone set out to moralize, to passionately assert their rigor, as it turned out - perverts, ethics - such as communists or Nazis. Someone by inertia continued to rest on his apparent impartiality. In the end, they completed the trajectory of their amorality in postmodernism, which devalued any, not only ethical or social attitude of the artist to absolute zero - "everything is equal to everything, and everything does not matter, because all values are not only equal but also equal. levels of zero (director of National Museum of Ukraine, Taras Vozniak)
Antonina and Ivan Denisiuc in collaboration with the art project «CABBAGE LAUGHS»
This project was made in 2014 on the basis of watercolors by Antonina Denisiuc Kapusta. The work metaphorically depicts two sides of Cabbage that visually point to Woman and Man, the World Atlas. Holy Cabbage, which is a vegetable, due to its structure and universality has acquired different metaphorical meanings in different cultures of the world. Cabbage is money, dressed like cabbage, someone does not have a head, but cabbage, children are found in cabbage. We create a digital world with a smile. Hanna and Gilbert and George, Neighbors, Cabbage Head, (What?) and other works became the heroes of our project.
Antonina Denisiuc
Antonina Denisiuc was born and raised in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, an architectural and visual gem of Eastern Europe in the Ukrainian-Romanian Jews family.
Studied at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. The first exhibitions included creative projects in Austria «Grenzgenger» and «Augenblick», created with the support of philanthropist Klaus Gipp (some works are in his private collection), and exhibitions at the Vienna Academy of Arts in the workshop of Michelangelo Pistoletto.
Antonina’s creative research began with a series of drawings of the Infinite Series (1991-1998. Some works of this period are in the collection of Albertina museum in Vienne), which testifies to the infinite life in human consciousness. Since 1998 the artist has been discussing the creation of a cliche of the similarity of reality through the imprint of the material world, a series of paintings by Stansya appears.
The works of Antonina Denisiuc were awarded the International Prizes and Fellowships of the Foundation of Krasner Pollock (USA), Culture Contact (Austria), Gaud Polonia (Poland, Ministry of Culture), Austrian Cooperative Bureau (Austria), Ertsiodicezia (Austria), Villa Decius (Poland) institute them Adam Mickiewicz (Poland) and others. Moreover, she was awarded the Lorenzo di Medici Prize at the VIII Florentine Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2011. The artist participated in Art Genoa 2012 and the Contemporary Art Salon of Art Monaco 2012, Salon Gemliuc 2013 under the patronage of Prince Albert II, Hidden Treasure London 2014, and many others.
Works are in collections: Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery, Ukraine; Lentos Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Albertina Museum, Collection of Graphics, Vienna, Austria Claus Hipp’s Collection of Contemporary Art, Austria, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Museum Salon Dalman, Berlin, Germany - Finland, Museum of Modernism, Lviv, Ukraine, Korsak’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Numerous private collections