Volodymyr Tsiupko

A Ukrainian painter and monumentalist artist who also worked in watercolor, gouache, and pencil drawing, Volodymyr Tsiupko was one of the main founders of the nonconformist movement in Odesa’s visual arts scene in the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1980s he was a core member of the Odesa underground seeking an alternative to Soviet socialist realist art. He was a master of monumentalist and decorative painting during the last third of the twentieth century, creating contemporary classics of Ukrainian nonfigurative painting. Experimenting with geometric abstraction from the 1970s onward in easel painting and graphics, by the early 2000s Tsiupko gradually arrived at his own version of abstract expressionism incorporating geometric elements.

Tsiupko attended the Odesa Art School (now the Grekov Odesa Art College) from 1956 to 1961, and the Leningrad Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry (now Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design), in the department of monumentalist and decorative painting (1964–70). He began his teaching career at the Odesa Art School, where he worked between 1962 and 1964. He returned to teaching again, now at university level, at the K. D. Ushynskyi Odesa Pedagogical Institute, where he taught drawing and painting from 1974 to 1976.

Tsiupko began mounting exhibitions as a student in the 1960s. After graduating, he regularly took part in unofficial “apartment exhibitions” in Odesa and Moscow through the 1970s. He was also a participant in the influential unofficial exhibition Contemporary Art from Ukraine. Munich-London-New York-Paris in 1979, which caused something of a stir in Europe. From the very beginning of his artistic activity in the 1960s, the young artist was devoted to creative exploration in art that prioritized aestheticism, focusing on beautiful and expressive form rather than content, and broke with the ideology and stylistic restrictions of socialist realism. He worked alongside like-minded Odesan nonconformist artists now recognized for their significant contributions to the formation and development of Ukrainian nonfigurative art and postmodernism such as Volodymyr Strelnikov, Aleksandr Anufriev, Viktor Maryniuk, Valerii Basanets, Liudmyla Yastreb, Yurii Yegorov, Valentin Khrushch, Stanislav Sychov, Ruslan Makoyev, Eugene Rakhmanin, Oleksandr Stovbur, Oleg Voloshynov, Ihor Bozhko, and Svetlana Yusim. In his own work, Tsiupko moved in the direction of avant-gardism, tirelessly searching for artistic language and aesthetic codes to suit his personal aesthetic vision.

Tsiupko’s individual creative self-expression first manifested itself in his refined and expressive minimalist portraits of women and men: Portrait of V. Asriev (1970s); Portrait of a Girl (1972); Self-Portrait (1971); Woman with a Bird (1970s); and Portrait of a Boy (1976). These portraits attracted the attention at the unofficial apartment exhibitions of the Odesa nonconformists.

By focusing on trying to address exclusively aesthetic concerns in contemporary European art, Tsiupko gradually abandoned the figurative in his easel painting and moved on to abstraction. First he explored the expressive possibilities and harmonious balance of color, light, line, and rhythm in works such as Composition (1970s); Thing A-1 (1972, ZAM, D15890) and Thinking A-2 (1972, ZAM, D15891); Landscape and Composition with Red (both 1973); Morning Portrait (1973–74, ZAM, D15883); and Vertical Structure (1976). At the end of the 1970s, he finally began to focus on nonfigurative painting, experimenting with geometric forms, usually squares and rectangles, to create “living” compositions that were energetic and emotional but solidly built with a harmonious balance of color combinations. “Composition is very important: structure, style, and everything related to it,” he asserted. “When each brushstroke becomes more expressive because of the previous one. It’s like writing: the beginning and a few preceding phrases. And the final phrase, which should blossom. This is very difficult to achieve. If this is missing, then there is no art.” [1] His extremely imaginative abstract paintings now carried philosophical messages and signs that awaken associations, empathies, and reflections in the viewer, as in Boats and Untitled (both 1977), Structure (1978), and Black Figure and Untitled (both 1979).

In the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to nonconformist easel paintings, watercolors, gouaches, and pencil drawings, Tsiupko created official monumentalist and decorative works: large-scale mosaics and tempera murals for the facades and interiors of public buildings in Odesa. In these projects he purposefully did not reject figurative images, since the decorative and abstracted form that was traditional and intrinsic to wall painting and mosaics allowed the artist to move away from the established figurative dogmas of socialist realism. His monumentalist and decorative works include the painting City on the Sea in the dining room of the Vorovsky factory, Odesa (1978); the mosaic Youth on the facade of School No. 13, Odesa (1982); paintings and mosaics in a kindergarten, Odesa (1982); ceiling paintings in the Hall of Modern Literature in the Literary Museum of Odesa (1984); and paintings in the interior of the Local History Museum in the village of Tatarbunary, Odesa region (1985). In the 1980s, he was an important member of the Monumentalist Painting Art Council within the Odesa Regional Organization of the Union of Artists for the Ukrainian SSR and was admitted to the Soviet Union of Artists in 1980. According to the artist, monumentalist and decorative painting of the 1970s and ’80s “became a powerful stimulus for the creative achievements of the Odesa modernists, an invaluable laboratory of modern art, the first territory conquered from the officialdom.” [2]

With the beginning of Ukraine’s independence era in 1991, the division between official and unofficial art ended, and Tsiupko finally had the opportunity to show his works at numerous exhibitions of modern art in Ukraine and abroad. He became a member of the National Association of Artists (NAM) in 1993, and a member of the creative association Mamai in 1998. He was named Artist of Ukraine in 2001.

From 1990 to the 2020s, Tsiupko remained a prominent figure of Ukrainian visual culture and a leader of abstract expressionism in Odesa. Over the years, the artist’s canvases have displayed ever more powerful use of colors, deeply bold in their contrasts. His abstractions have also acquired more complex combinations of geometric planes, in synergy with spherical and ovoid forms, or with fonts that the author invents and embeds in his canvases, suggesting concealed content. For over a half century, Tsiupko’s paintings have reflected his inner world and emotional states, expressed in his distinctive aesthetic style.

Tsiupko’s works are in the collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Odesa, the Odesa National Art Museum, and the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

His awards include Diploma of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (1994); first prize of the H. Yakutovych Graphic Art Competition-Exhibition of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (2010); and the Grand Prix of the All-Ukrainian Triennale of Painting of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, Kyiv (2019).

Zoya Chegusova

Translated from Ukrainian by Nathan Jeffers

Notes:

1. Quoted in Roman Krakaliia, “Glybynna avtentychnist’ Volodymyra Tsiupka. Pohliad z robitni maistra na ioho mystetsvo” [The deep authenticity of Volodymyr Tsiupko: A view of his art from the master's workshop], Chornomors’ki Novyny, November 16, 2023.

2. Entry on Volodymyr Tsiupko, “Modernisty Odesy, 1960–2013” [Modernists of Odesa, 1960–2013], in Volodymyr Tsiupko, ed., Al’bomi-katalozi ‘Modernisty Odesy’ [Album catalogue: Modernists of Odesa] (Kyiv: Famil’na drukarnia huss, 2014), 11.