FATHER AND SON- ART FOR UKRAINE

 

 

Another Ukrainian artist who just popped into my search is IRENAEUS YURCHUK. 

He was born in Ukraine during World War II and raised in Upstate New York. He moved to New York City to earn an Architecture degree from The Cooper Union and graduate degrees in Urban Design and Planning from Columbia University.

He has participated in group exhibitions in North America and Europe, and his works are held in private collections in the US and abroad.

He worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art full-time.

 Much of his new work is a response to Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine.

(Paining to left: "Kharkiv Forever")

 “Over the years my work has evolved to combine multiple-image photography with drawing and painting, using a variety of digital editing and physical montage techniques. This includes adjusting inkjet images by applying acrylics, watercolors, pastels, markers, colored pencils together with selected collage materials to achieve a desired effect.”

The Ukrainian Institute of America states: The dense matrix that occupies Irenaeus Yurchuk’s paintings appears both constructed and organic. Like the cultural and historical architecture they evoke, these vague photomechanical records have grown from some originating seed into a pulsating mass whose boundaries are indeterminate and fluctuating. While his approach is characterized by a modernist recombination of photographic fragments into wholly abstract combinations, Irenaeus Yurchuk augments his surfaces with chromatic paint media and other materials to engineer a detailed diagrammatic figuration. The final effect proves a stunning pastiche of image, pattern, color and texture.

                       Painting to right is :”Angel of Kharkiv”

 

Irenaus' son DORIAN YURCHUK  was born in 1970 in New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, while also attending classes at the New School for Social Research and at Harvard University. 

In 1998, Dorian was awarded the degree of Master of Architecture, History and Theory Option, at McGill University. His current research centers around the link between laughter and healing, as evidenced in sources such as Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel and Joubert's Traite di Ris. Dorian's travels have taken him from Anchorage to Kharkiw, and he has difficulty staying indoors. He now works at an architectural restoration firm in New York City where he beholds, probes and reconstructs facades for a living.

In contrast to his father, Dorian Yurchuk develops rituals, creating objects, reliefs and illustrations that operate between painting and sculpture, and further establish new realms for visual exploration. Multilayered in their direct and indirect intents, these works are resonant with Yurchuk’s occupational and perceptual past, incorporating objects and remnants from the building trade and using these elemental materials to create works imbued with a poetic spirit residing between order and chaos, creation and destruction.

Dorian’s grander two-dimensional compositions are created as turbulent renderings by an inveterate outdoorsman responding to topographies from above and below.