Petro Malyshko

A member of the sixties generation of Ukrainian artists (shistdediatnyky), Petro Malyshko was a painter, graphic artist, and sculptor. He was a member of the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR and an Honored Artist of Ukraine. He worked at the intersection of figurative art and abstraction, drawing on the traditions of Ukrainian modernism and folklore. His highly expressive works were dedicated to the themes of Ukrainian history, memory, and culture.

Malyshko was born on July 5, 1941, in the village Znamenivka, in the Novomoskovsk region in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Malyshhko’s formation as an artist was influenced by his older brother, Mykola (b. 1938), who shaped his artistic values. Together, Mykola and Petro Malyshko would participate in organizations and exhibitions that took place within the unofficial art scene of the time.

In 1963 Malyshko graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) Art School, where he studied with Oleksandr Kuko (1904–1971) and Vsevolod Shpyhanovych (1922–1987). He began participating in exhibitions in 1966. After graduating from art school, he worked as a monumentalist painter at the Kyiv Art Combine (kombinat) until 1990. In the 1970s and 1980s, he created a number of monumental ensembles in Kaliningrad (Russia), Kyiv, Trostianets, Bila Tserkva, and Brovary, as well as other places.

Malyshko’s individual creative style was formed quite early in his career, in the second half of the 1960s. The artist’s inclination toward abstraction, large forms, exquisite coloring, and the use of contrasting colors to create dramatic conflict were already apparent at that time. It was owing to both his childhood memories of the southern Ukrainian steppe and its monuments (for example, the Polovtsian stone women) and his wider artistic circle in the 1960s that he developed an interest in Ukrainian history, especially its more tragic or suppressed episodes. [1] The formation of the artist’s style was also influenced by his study of the history of Ukrainian monumental art of the 1920s (for instance, the school of Mykhailo Boichuk) and by folk art.

In 1983, together with Oleksandr Fysun, Oleksandr Hashchuk, and his brother Mykola, Malyshko made and installed a stone cross on the grave of the artist Mykola Polovyi, who tragically died while creating a mural in Kyiv. That cross started a tradition that continued with crosses placed in memory of other artists, writers, and public figures of the 1960s. 

In 1987 Malyshko took part in one of the first post-perestroika exhibitions representing unofficial monumentalist art, Погляд [Look] at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. In 1990 he became a member of an association of the same name, formed at the Kyiv branch of the Union of Artists of Ukraine. At the exhibition, Malyshko presented the artworks Неминучі втрати [Inevitable Losses] (1985, ZAM, D15681) and Від Києва до Чигирина [From Kyiv to Chyhyryn] (1984, ZAM, D15682), which are now in the collection of the Zimmerli Museum. Created at the border between abstraction and figuration, they are imbued with a keen sense of tragedy; the emotion in these pieces is enhanced by a nuanced use of color. Malyshko’s experience of working in the field of monumental art, with its characteristic forms, philosophical nature, and rich use of symbols, also affected the artist’s easel work. Indeed, his associative exposition of dramatic historical events was also achieved through a rethinking of the surrealist tradition, which brings his work closer to the experience of American postwar abstraction, in particular abstract expressionism.

Starting from recognizable forms from the material world, Malyshko began creating his own reality. The central principle of his compositions, particularly his paintings, is the unstable balance between light and dark colors, colorful spots, and diagonals (Гасне день [Daylight Fades]; Коливання [Oscillations]; and Голос сопілки [The Voice of the Flute], all dating from 1991). Saturated color, pulsing or flickering, served as the basis for creating the image of a new work. This was then supplemented by figurative elements: the silhouette of a person, plant, or bird. Thanks to the help of conventional forms, the artist was able to make the images richer and more concentrated.

Another feature of Malyshko’s artworks is the frequent introduction of black into the composition, which not only is a tool for creating contrast but also generates dynamism, tension, and a sense of depth. Malyshko emphasized the suggestive nature of the color black—its ability to tighten as well as to act as a background for bright and intense colors.

The impetus for Malyshko’s new artistic ideas was often generated by a particular life or historical event, which would later be transformed into a painting or another symbolic (surrealistic) form. The creative style of Malyshko, with its excitement, dematerialization of objects, and birth of fantastical images (translucent, fragile, and illusory), expanded the stylistic space of Ukrainian art from the 1970s to the 1990s, introducing the wider trends of post-surrealist abstraction and an expressionist tradition.

In 1992 Petro Malyshko, along with Petro Honchar, Nina Denysova, Mykola Malyshko, Oleksandr Mel’nyk, Volodymyr Fed’ko, and Vasyl’ Khymochka, founded the Братство преподобного Аліпія [Brotherhood of Saint Alypius]. The following year, the State Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts (now the National Art Museum of Ukraine) hosted the Brotherhood’s first exhibition, entitled Біля яблуні [By the Apple Tree], [2] dedicated to the memory of Mykhailo Boichuk, the founder of the Ukrainian modernist monumentalist painting school, and his students. Conceived by Nina Denysova, the exhibition presented interpretations of the motif of the apple tree, which was fundamental to the Boichuk school, as if continuing the work begun by those monumentalists in the 1920s, tragically cut short by Stalin’s repressions. In his tempera painting on canvas, Malyshko conveyed tragedy by making the tree reminiscent of the crucifixion and creating a color palette focused on the clash of black with bright flashes of color. He drew attention to the sadness and defenseless beauty inherent in Boichuk’s work through the piercing loneliness of the apple tree, which almost merges with the figure of a woman, while the yellow and red colors of the house appear as a glowing, forgotten paradise. The apple tree itself is depicted as leafless, and the only apple left is turning yellow, serving as the last light before an impending chaos.

Petro Malyshko’s first solo exhibition was held in Kyiv in 1998. From 1999 to 2000, Malyshko participated in the restoration of the Cathedral of Saint Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv. He completed several compositions in the interior of the cathedral, adhering to the traditions of the Ukrainian Baroque, with its rich symbolic language.

Starting in the 1990s, alongside painting, Malyshko systematically worked in small-form graphics, in particular with bookplates. He took part in many such projects internationally and in Ukraine and received a number of awards at triennials and competitions in Italy (2000), Greece (2005, 2008), Kazakhstan (2006), Poland (2007), Romania (2009), and Spain (2010). Malyshko’s bookplates are in many ways a development of his characteristic style in painting as seen in his previous works; most prevalent are woodcuts, allowing for strong contrasts and facilitating the collision of large planes of color, which Malyshko so favored.

In the early 2000s, the artist’s brother, Mykola Malyshko, participated in the creation of a memorial sign at the site of the executions of Ukrainian cultural figures in 1937 in the Sandarmokh Forest (located in the Republic of Karelia in the Russian Federation). The artist’s work was deeply affected by his immersion in the history of Ukraine’s struggle for independence in the early twentieth century and Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. He went on to create a number of expressive abstract compositions, including Крути [Kruty] (2004), Зелений клин [Green Wedge] (2005), and Сандармох [Sandarmokh] (2005).

The artist died on December 31, 2020, in Kyiv.

Oksana Barshynova

Translated from Ukrainian by Nathan Jeffers

Notes:

1. Many of the Polovtsian stone women were destroyed by Russian troops during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

2. The title refers to a well-known motif depicted by Mykhailo Boichuk and his students. The most famous of them is By the Apple Tree (1919–20) by Tymofii Boichuk (1896–1922).