Volodymyr Budnikov

Volodymyr Budnikov is an abstract artist and a longtime professor of painting. He gradually abandoned figuration while maintaining official Soviet employment during the 1970s and ’80s. Working initially in the genre of lyrical and introspective landscape, often in monochrome or with a very limited color palette, Budnikov has been inspired by his explorations of metaphysics, Japanese calligraphy, and baroque and contemporary art. Deliberately suspending traditional boundaries of mediums, he merges oil painting, drawing, notations, doodles, graffiti, and other techniques and materials to achieve an effect of ontological uncertainty. He often worked in series, materializing time and transformation. A member of the Soviet Union of Artists since 1975, he was named an Honored Artist of Ukraine in 1972 and Artist of the Year by the Association of Art Galleries of Ukraine in 1998.

Budnikov graduated from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Republican Art School for children gifted in art in 1965, and from 1965 to 1971 attended the Kyiv State Art Institute (now National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture of Ukraine). There he studied under Tetyana Yablonska (1917–2005), a Stalin Prize laureate and established socialist realist painter who was also influenced by the Ukrainian avant-garde tradition through her teacher Fedir Krychevsky (1879–1947). As early as 1972, Budnikov himself started to teach painting at the Kyiv Fine Art Institute, where he remained until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, influencing generations of Ukrainian painters and artists. Among his students was Vlada Ralko (b. 1969), now his wife, with whom he frequently exhibits (though he otherwise avoids participating in any art groups or collective shows).   

As a student, Budnikov specialized in monumental art, which in the Soviet period designated works such as murals or mosaics that decorated public areas—often of grand scale and with an ideological underpinning. In practice, this specialization allowed more formal freedom, since nonrealistic elements could be interpreted in such works as ornamentation and therefore tolerated, whereas in painting, abstraction was strictly forbidden. Despite his practical specialization, Budnikov was always driven to fundamental exploration of the painterly medium, and in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s he started to develop his own pictorial language, focusing on genre paintings and landscapes. His paintings Зима в Києві [Zyma v Kyievi, Winter in Kyiv] (1975), Хива [Khiva] (1978), Київські Реставратори [Kyivski Restavratory, Kyiv Restorers] (1980), and Неділя на Подолі [Nedilia na Podoli, Sunday on Podil] (1983) demonstrate the evolution in Budnikov’s technique, where texture and color were becoming more important than content. It became obvious that academic and easel painting were exerting less influence on him than in his early career. Clearly, formal painterly aspects became more important, as complex layered textures appeared and a limited and nuanced color palette replaced the bright hues of official realism. Additionally, Budnikov’s landscapes and still lifes started to brim with emotional tension, endowing his paintings with a metaphysical quality. The artist began creating works that were not intended for official exhibitions and were only presented to a close circle of artist-friends including Zoya Lerman (1934–2014) and Anatoly Lymariev (1929–1985). [1] These unofficial gatherings attracted the attention of the KGB, risking Budnikov’s expulsion from the Soviet Union of Artists and, therefore, from the profession, but these threats never materialized.

Despite rumors and covert threats, Budnikov was not openly punished or persecuted by the authorities except for being barred from exhibiting in public art shows. Thus, his work was known only to his students and close friends during the majority of the Soviet period. After the 1979 exhibition Young Artists of Kyiv, [2] however, his work started to gain more attention and his style became bolder, with the landscape genre serving as a vehicle for emotional and philosophical introspection. His landscape Гра [Hra, The Game] (1985, ZAM, D10532) is bursting with a feeling of mystery and secret ritual, with sharp shadows accentuating the highly abstracted figures and simplified geometric rendering of the architectural fragments, sea, and a palm tree. This and many of his landscapes were created or inspired by Crimea, Yalta or Gurzuf in particular, cities that he visited annually from his childhood years until the region’s annexation by Russia in 2014. According to the artist, the landscapes he created there captured his artistic inner sense. [3] Timeless and seemingly unchanging vistas provided visual material for expressing his private mythologies and transforming painting aesthetics.

Later, especially after Ukrainian independence in 1992, Budnikov became known as an abstract painter with a highly recognizable manner, characterized by a subdued color palette and calligraphic mark making. The Ukrainian art critic Viktoria Burlaka described his color preferences as an “adherence to a color ascesis” because his palette became primarily monochrome black and white with few color accents. She also noted that he enjoyed playing with the idea of medium-specificity by blurring the boundaries between painting and drawing. [4] In oil-on-canvas works that often appear as enlarged calligraphic inscriptions, Budnikov merged the substantiality of oil painting with the fragility and ephemerality of works on paper. While resembling calligraphy, his inscriptions did not carry meaning as language traditionally would, but instead, each letter manifested as an empty sign, a floating signifier without a signified. Thus, Budnikov applied the technique of abstraction not only to the painting but also to the text, depriving both of narrative content and endowing them instead with an organic feeling of living matter—in the artist’s words, “a living organism that changes, leaves traces, undergoes metamorphosis, sheds its old skin.” [5] His most recent and well-known series engaging language as mark making is Напис [Napys, Inscription] (2019).

As one of the first artists in Ukraine to be called a neo-baroque painter while working in an abstract manner, Budnikov has explored the Ukrainian visual tradition. He has focused on nonobjective elements of the baroque style, from the ornamental folk roots of the Ukrainian baroque to the drapery and architectural decoration of the high baroque. His long-term project Битва [Bytva, Battle] (2007), which reinterprets the baroque through an ornamental “tapestry” effect, has often been featured in Budnikov exhibitions in Ukraine, at venues including Mystetsky Arsenal and Lavra Gallery in Kyiv and Pidhirtsi Castle in Lviv. Apart from the visual language of the baroque, Budnikov is interested in the sense of catastrophe associated with the baroque worldview, and this feeling of urgency and existence on the verge of collapse manifests itself in many of his series. His large exhibition Сховок для світла [Skhovok dlia svitla, Hiding Place for Light] (2020) at Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery presented his oeuvre from 2003 to 2020 and demonstrated his unwavering interest in baroque high contrasts such as light and shadow, quiet and lamentation, mystery and revelation.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Budnikov relocated with his wife to Lviv and later to Berlin, Germany. In June 2022, he presented his exhibition project Час Війни [Chas viyny, Time of War] at the Lviv Museum of Modernism.

Olena Martynyuk and Anna Luhovska

Photo portrait: jetsetter.ua

Notes:

1. Both were notable representatives of the Ukrainian 1960s generation that appeared during the Khrushchev Thaw and was crushed by the authorities in the 1970s.

2. V. Nechyporenko, Molodi khudozhnyky Kyieva: Vystavka zhyvopysu [Young artists of Kyiv: Exhibition of paintings]. Kyiv, 1979.

3. Kateryna Iakovlenko, “Khudozhnyky Volodymyr Budnikov ta Vlada Ralko: Mystetstvo—zavzhdy pro yavyshche” [Artists Volodymyr Budnikov and Vlada Ralko: Art is always about a phenomenon], Ukrainska pravda, 10 October 2020. 

4. "Volodymyr Budnikov" in Library of Ukrainian Art.

5. Kostіantyn Doroshenko. “Shcho khotiv skazaty khudozhnyk?” [What did the artist want to say?], Your Art, 2019.