Curator Pavlo Gudimov

Our collaboration with Ihor Yanovych began long before the opening of the Ya Gallery art center in 2007. We met back in our student days. One of my classmates, knowing about my passion for abstract art, suggested that we meet her artist neighbor. From the first minutes of our conversation, Ihor turned out to be an attentive and deep interlocutor. At that time, it was difficult to predict that this seemingly random meeting would start a creative collaboration that would last for over 25 years.

I organized Yanovych's first exhibition in 2003 in the space of the then small Ya Design showroom in Kyiv, in Podil. The exposition was as thoughtful as possible, like everything in Ihor's work, and at the same time concise: eight horizontal works on medium-format paper in an infinitely gray, complex tonality. Even then, I noticed how Yanovych's abstract works work in space - harmonizing, they transform it.

Each work was both self-sufficient and united with those that were nearby, forming a common polyphony of the series. Focusing on the musical metaphors that arose as a result of the perception of the artist's works, I already knew then that music for Yanovych is a source of special inspiration. It sprouts in his works, everyone can "perform" it as a score of reflections on his work.

In 2019, at the opening of the Lviv space of Ya Gallery with the exhibition "Black", jazz double bassist Mark Tokar successfully transformed painting into improvisational music.

We always talked about art. It was the center of everything. Each of us was uncompromisingly devoted to it. The artist is like a separate universe. I remember a trip to the Venice Biennale, where on the first day I fell ill with an acute form of chickenpox (in Italian - vapolicella). Every evening, Ihor would come to my room, where I was alone, sad and with a high fever. To somehow console me, he would tell me about everything he had seen during the day, showing me photographs and exhibition catalogues.

I considered Ihor my unquestionable mentor — both in curatorship and in the spatial vision of exhibitions. I always watched with interest how he worked on exhibitions: he created models of the premises in which the project was to take place and placed copies of his works to scale. Later, I learned that in the 1970s and 1980s, the artist worked fruitfully on museum and other exhibition exhibitions on commission.

A special atmosphere reigned in his studio on Kostya Levytsky Street.

On the first floor of the former house of the gypsy baron, he had two rooms and a kitchen. One room was just for work, where everything was in its place: brushes of all sizes in jars and mugs, countless paints, cellophane on the floor, because the artist painted most of his canvases by placing them on the floor. The second room had a comfortable sofa and armchairs, a coffee table in the middle, and, of course, music. In this room, Ihor worked at the table, creating small paper works. And when guests came, he treated them to delicious green tea, which he prepared according to his own recipe, adding ginger, lemon, and other ingredients.

I had never seen the artist work. It remained a mystery to me.

In what state of calm and at the same time inner tension he must have been in, in order to create his gestural abstraction with such special precision and at the same time improvisation! Over the years of our work and communication, I have watched his transformation. This is what our exhibition “Journey" is about. I saw this title in Yanovych's author's text when I was exploring the archive in the studio with his son Andriy.

Ihor Yanovych passed away on December 30, 2023. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat down in his favorite chair. I still haven't come to terms with his passing.

This exhibition is an attempt to look at the artist's life and work like never before. It covers his path: from his first realistic paintings and his period of study at the institute to his work on ceramic panels for interiors, which he created in the 1970s and mid-1980s, while working at an art factory. The exhibition introduces the first searches for abstract expression at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s and shows a complete rejection of everything that prevented him from focusing on non-objective art.

This is a path of constant search — and an exit to the recognizable, rough-virtuoso style of Yanovych, which became the culmination of his career.

The exhibition is accompanied by the author's texts and quotes, memories of the artist, his biography, fragments of curatorial texts. These additions provide an opportunity to deeply and multifacetedly comprehend a selection of his works, which were rarely or never exhibited in Lviv.

We invite you on a journey in which the artist reveals himself to us, constantly searching for new, hitherto unknown horizons of creativity. They led to new discoveries and deep experiences for both the artist himself and those who observed this path. Who moved together with a powerful and honest artist of modern abstract art — a world-class artist.