Heorhii Senchenko

Heorhii Senchenko was one of the founders of the Ukrainian transavantgarde and worked in painting, video, installation, scenography, and performance art. In the early 1990s, he was a member of the Paris Commune art squat in Kyiv, and from 1982 to 1996, he worked in a creative duo with Arsen Savadov (b. 1962). He currently lives and works in Kyiv.

Senchenko graduated from the Taras Shevchenko State Art High School in Kyiv in 1980, and in 1986, he graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute (now National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture) in the department of theater and decorative arts, where he studied in the studio of Danylo Lider, one of the leading stage designers in Ukraine. While still a student, Senchenko began to work as the chief artist (1983–88) at the Kyiv Academic Theater of Drama and Comedy on the Left Bank (Left Bank Theater). The specialization earned in his professional education and practical theater work inevitably affected the nature of his easel-based artworks. This impact extended to pieces completed jointly with Savadov, with whom he became close during art school.

His first exhibition was a series of theatrical sketches, shown back to back in the spring of 1987 at the State Exhibition of Young Artists in the Moscow Manege and again at the same exhibition in Kyiv at a Soviet republican level. Despite their original application, these pieces stood alone as artworks and contained the beginnings of postmodernist painting, a movement in which the pair of Kyiv artists would later excel.

This same exhibition at the Moscow Manege included their imposing canvas Печаль Клеопатри [Cleopatra's Sorrow] (1987, private collection), which caused an unprecedented stir and established their position as the founders of the new wave in Ukrainian painting, a year later defined by critics as "neo-baroque of a transavantgarde type." [1] Created as if in a single breath, the canvas stood out for its characteristic postmodern methodology and style: meta-mythology and referentiality, bright color evoking a sense of fantastical reality (e.g., its green sky), absurdity (such as a female figure riding a tiger), comic book techniques, curly graphic brushstrokes, and a red outline around the central group of figures. Вітальний сезон [Vital Season] was another large pictorial artwork painted in the same vein by the duo in 1987. Both works were shown in February 1988 in Madrid at ARCO contemporary art fair in the booth of the then-famous Parisian Galerie de France, which acquired them for its collection. In the fall of 1987, Cleopatra's Sorrow was also presented by this gallery in Paris at the Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (FIAC).

For the next State Exhibition of Young Artists, held in 1988 in Moscow, Senchenko and Savadov prepared separately and individually. While already using transavantgarde principles in their work, both artists tried to develop unique features and nuances in their art. Senchenko exhibited a large canvas piece: Сакральний пейзаж Пітеря Брейгеля [Sacred Landscape of Pieter Bruegel] (1988, ZAM, 1993.0591). It is now in the collection of the Zimmerli Museum and was displayed in the institution’s November 2021 exhibition Painting in Excess: Kyiv’s Art Revival 1985–1993. Almost immediately after creating the piece, Senchenko painted a slightly smaller version, which was acquired by the PinchukArtCentre collection in the 2000s and featured in a number of the Center's projects, including Рудий Ліс [Red Forest] (2009) and Батьківщина в огні. Інтервенція Колективу конкретних дат [Motherland on Fire. Intervention by Concrete Dates Collective] (2017). This Senchenko painting can also be considered a classic application of the methodology of postmodern deconstruction, wherein the borrowed original meaning is reinterpreted. Senchenko references Pieter Bruegel the Elder's famous drawing The Beekeepers and the Birdnester (sometimes called The Nest Robber) (1568), now held in the Kupferstichkabinett [Museum of Prints and Drawings] at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany. He translates its graphic technique (paper, ink, pen) into the language of painting (canvas, oil) and thereby infuses the work with striking color intensity—even a sense of hysteria—adding a contemporary emotional charge to the historical source.

Unlike his coauthor Savadov in Cleopatra’s Sorrow, Senchenko lacks his colleague’s dynamic presence. Instead, his work is marked by subtlety, even softness. These qualities, combined with an expressionist style, lend his paintings a sense of both fragility and illusion, which evokes metaphysical depth—a feeling of teetering on the edge of mystery. He provokes the viewer to search for clues for to what is happening in his painting, as its contents obscure seemingly obvious action. Senchenko’s Sacred Landscape of Pieter Bruegel is a multilayered piece, saturated with absurd connotations.

In his drawing The Beekeepers, Bruegel addresses the theme of human greed and temptation, emphasized by the depiction of stealing honey from wild bees. It is a visual metaphor warning the viewer about the consequences of ill-considered desires. Senchenko’s work not only pays tribute to the great master, but also reinterprets his ideas for modernity. One of the central themes of his painting is the worldliness and vanity of earthly life. The artist emphasizes the fragility of human existence and the transience of all earthly affairs. This theme gained special significance in the light of the ecological disaster of Chornobyl that shook Ukraine in 1986; beekeepers were suddenly reframed as human decontaminators from the radiation zone. Beyond its aesthetic purpose, the picture thus became a document of its time. The cyclical nature characteristic of Bruegel's work is also featured in Senchenko’s painting, as he depicts natural cycles and changes, symbolizing destruction, death, and rebirth. The illusion of revival is embedded in the way the artist colorizes the original black-and-white source. Finally, the religious and spiritual motifs of Bruegel's work are reinterpreted by Senchenko as he integrates these motifs to raise questions about man's place in the world, in particular to man-made disasters, and provoke reflection of the past and mindfulness toward the future.

Senchenko continued his individual creative journey in 1989, while Savadov was in residence in France for almost six months. He painted another large untitled canvas depicting ruins composed of various architectural elements. Stylistically, this piece remained close to the canonical works of the duo’s previous body of art created in the years prior. After Savadov's return from France, the duo's joint work resumed and continued until 1996. Senchenko was co-artist of all the most important projects of this period, such as Мавпочки [Monkeys] (1991), Втрачений рай [Paradise Lost] (1991), Постанестезія [Postanesthesia] (1992), Голоси Любові [Voices of Love] (1994), Герби [Coats of Arms] (1994), and Злочин і кара [Crime and Punishment] (1995). These works included nearly all the prevalent artistic practices of that period: painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Their final project together, Welcome!, was exhibited at Manifesta 1, the 1996 European Biennial of European Art in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

A year later, Senchenko was invited to participate in the international exhibition Симптоматична анонімність [Symptomatic Anonymity] at the Soros Center in Kyiv, where he presented conceptual art objects: audio boxes full of mysterious meanings. It was after this that he suddenly brought his art career to a long-term halt and gave himself fully to commercial design.

This break in his practice lasted until 2017, when his exhibition 7 Types of Panic opened at the Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kyiv. The exhibition consisted of large-scale graphic images, created by the artist during its run, which incorporated graffiti art stylization and the visual principles of noir comic books. The pieces explored and classified the theme of panic using a variety of artistic techniques and use of lightly ironic symbolism. In essence, this project was a parody of positivism. Shadow was one of Senchenko’s main means of expression across the works for its capacity to obscure. This desire for concealment is a central theme throughout the artist's entire oeuvre.

Oleksandr Soloviov

Translated from Russian by Nathan Jeffers

Photo portrait source: Korydor, December 9, 2016. 

Notes:

1. Bazhanov, Leonid, and Valery Turchin, “Ritorika Totalnogo Somnenia” [The Rhetoric of Total Hesitation]. In Tvorchestvo 2 (1989).