Curator Pavlo Gudimov

The idea of a new exhibition for the Ya Gallery space was crystallized by Ihor and I back in 2023, when, meeting, we analyzed his new works on paper. The sheets were emotional, bold, and the gestural abstraction was sharper and more brutal. Current events were vividly reflected in the artist's fresh work.

Non-figurative or abstract art has no emotional and technical boundaries. It is the non-verbal nature of such art that is an important sign of the absence of mediation by words, explanations, or the imposition of a concept. Such works are perceived in direct contact with the viewer, who passes through himself and processes what he sees, according to his algorithms of perception, preparation, and emotional state.

With his art, Yanovych has always been able to reach the very depths of the beholder.

A special transformation of Ihor Yanovych's creative method has become noticeable in the projects of the last 20 years. With each exhibition, the artist's level of emotionality and temperament has grown. It is enough to recall the cycles of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the monochrome structures of the “Reliefs" series, where the basis was an ordered rhythmic organization, and the color gray dominated. In contrast to the previous works, the changes in the following projects — “Polychromies" (2005), “Matter", “Dialogue", “Horizontals", “Flow", “Subjective Space", as well as the latest series “Trajectory" and “Sign" — are especially noticeable. They can be seen as a way out to greater freedom of artistic means. The artist discovered new spatial, coloristic and thematic approaches. The techniques that he initially used in small works on paper increasingly appeared in pictorial cycles, acquiring a rough, expressive gesture that truly celebrates our time and the events we are experiencing. The culmination of these searches was to be an exhibition cycle built on gestural movement as the defining visual technique of the project. But at the peak of his career and skill, Ihor Yanovych suddenly passed away in December 2023. As a curator who was used to working with Ihor in direct dialogue, I needed a pause — to realize how to move forward in working with the projects of his creative heritage.

This year, I proposed to exhibit two separate Ihor projects in Kyiv and Lviv at once. In Lviv, I proposed to show the exhibition "Journey", where I partially chronologically proposed to show the different aspects and periods of the author's work from the second half of the 1960s through works with monumentally decorative ceramics - the initial stage of the painterly path of searches. And the second stage — the transition to abstraction as a single method.

In Kyiv, we are putting together an exhibition of the author's abstractions, based on expressive gesture, which also presents works from recent years and some of the works that are the latest in the author's work and were supposed to lead to a programmatic project, but remained at the level of development or idea. This idea, in my opinion, has enough foundation to be a self-sufficient exhibition, which we suggest you view.