Ihor Yanovych

Born in 1944 in Kyiv to a family of engineers. In the summer he would visit his grandmother, who had a house on the outskirts of Bila Tserkva. From there he remembers a large garden that seemed like a whole world to him.

In 1947 he moved with his mother to Lviv, where he received his primary education. The Yanovychs' neighbor in the center of post-war Lviv was an old one-eyed artist, whose work Ihor often observed and mastered the copying technique.

From 1955 he attended a fine arts club at the Lviv Palace of Pioneers, where he had opportunities to travel to the Carpathians for a longer period. There he painted in the open air for the first time. Since his school years he was actively involved in gymnastics. During his compulsory service in the Soviet army (1963–1966), he attended an art studio at the Officers' House in Lviv (directed by Volodymyr Cherkasov). There he studied drawing, painting, and art history, which laid the foundation for Ihor as an artist.

In the late 1960s, he studied at the Lviv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts (now the Lviv National Academy of Arts), at the Department of Ceramics. His thesis was "Decorative Interior Design of the Dance Bar of the Intourist Hotel".

After graduating, he created ceramic works until the early 1980s, decorating public spaces in cities such as Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Ternopil, Simferopol, and Yevpatoria.

In 1987–1988, he devoted himself entirely to painting and graphics in his own studio. Ihor gradually moved away from figurative painting and began to work exclusively on abstraction.

Participant of over 70 foreign and international projects, author of over 30 personal exhibitions and projects in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Austria and Germany.

In 1992, he became interested in the etching technique, and was successful at international graphic triennials in Norway, the USA, Japan and Belgium.

In 1994, Ihor exhibited his own project in the Berlin Golitsyn Gallery, and visited the Neue Nationalgalerie - where he first saw the works of Antoni Tapies, who became a landmark figure in art for Ihonovich. The year is also important because of his acquaintance with the musician Yuriy Yaremchuk. They are united by a view of common ideas in contemporary art - the search for strong emotional states, improvisation and the use of spontaneous moments, harmony and dissonance.

Since 2000, he has been collaborating with curator Pavel Gudimov. One of the landmark joint projects is the exhibition "Dialogue", where Yanovych's painting was presented in dialogue with sacral sculpture of the 18th - early 20th centuries.

Three times he received the award of the International Triennial of Painting of the States of the Carpathian Region "Silver Square" in Poland (1998, 2003 and 2006).

In 2008, Yanovych created a new series of works on A4 sheets - they were diverse, not connected by a single idea. The format of office paper gave Ihor a feeling of complete freedom and a desire to experiment with materials. And although at first the artist perceived this as sketches of future paintings, he later realized that he had received a completely self-sufficient cycle of works. This was the beginning of new projects that received their physical embodiment in 2011 in the format of the exhibition "Subjective Space" and in 2017 - as the book "Folder".

Then, Yanovych, in collaboration with Maria Bykova, started a new project "Context", the idea of which is to show painting in a completely unusual situation, in an atypical space or social environment. Lychakiv Cemetery, the market, a street vernissage of paintings - the deformed walls of the ancient city became the background for Yanovych's abstractions, where the effect of the third reality arose. The works either organically fit into the environment, or worked on contrast.

In 2011, together with Maria Bykova, he participated in the exhibition "Context" at Titanikas Exhibition Halls, Vilnius Academy Of Arts, and has repeatedly participated in ArtVilnius.

In his work, Ihor Yanovych often tried to work in series, cycles, which made it possible to more clearly reveal the idea of the project, to give a certain movement, where each work looked like a part of the whole, such projects: Matter (2007), Horizontals (2008), Subjective Space (2011), Lobotomy (2012), Current (2014), Trajectory (2016), Form (2021), etc.

During the war, his works participated in countries such as Lithuania, Denmark, Greece, Poland, etc. Yanovych made his last project “Fragments" in 2023 in Przemyśl at the Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej (BWA).

On December 28, 2023, Ihor, having put the coffee to boil and sitting in his own chair, mysteriously and peacefully passed away. Ihor Yanovych is buried in Lviv, at the Lychakiv Cemetery, near such artists as Volodymyr Loboda and Yaroslav Motyka.