Vasiliy Ryabchenko


Vasiliy Ryabchenko is a Ukrainian painter, photographer, and installation artist. One of the key figures in contemporary Ukrainian art, and the “New Ukrainian Wave”.

Biography

Vasiliy Ryabchenko was born on 23 July 1954 in Odessa in the family of the Soviet graphic artist Sergey Ryabchenko.
His art education begins in 1966 in an art school.
In 1969, he entered the painting faculty at Grekov Odessa Art School.
From 1974 to 1976, studying as an auditor in the Mukhina School of Art in Leningrad, and on his return to Odessa - acquaintance and friendship with Valentin Khrushch and the Odessa "nonconformists". During this period, he actively experiments with photography. The main subjects were non-stop objects still-lives, later - a combination of objects and bodies, in the layout of which the artist used the "voidness" and asymmetry inherent in the Eastern tradition.
From 1978 to 1983 he studied at the Ushinsky South Ukrainian Pedagogical University at the art-graphic faculty, where his teachers were Zinaida Borisyuk and Valery Gegamyan.
In this period he starts actively participate in artists group that appeared in Odessa: Sergey Lykov, Elena Nekrasova, Alexander Roitburd, Vasiliy Ryabchenko, who declared themselves in the late 1980s with the exhibitions "After Modernism 1" and "After Modernism 2". The group, little known in the official artistic environment and unrelated to the unofficial nonconformists group, held two major resonant exhibitions on the territory of the state institution — Odessa Art Museum. Large formats, themes and subjects of the works did not remain any visitors indifferent. There was effective support among urban intellectuals, journalists, young entrepreneurs who created and maintained the first Tirs Contemporary Art Center in Odessa.
Lives and works in Odessa.

Work

Vladimir Levashev singles out several periods in the work of Vasiliy Ryabchenko. For "transavantgarde" Ryabchenko, peculiar by programmatic emptiness and adjusted aestheticism, frivolous playfulness and mechanistic combinatorics. As an example of the works of the second half of the 1980s — "Cats", a story about two cats-rivals. In the subsequent version, made during the period of the final aggravation of relations between the two superpowers that led to the collapse of the USSR, the plot changed its semantic context due to a change in the size, color, manner of writing and title — "Deterrence".
The "Rococo line" is also traced in Ryabchenko's subsequent works, up to and including which were made recently. The artist is still committed to the passions of the nineties. It seems that the "inspirationally irrational "recomposition" of the motives of his own yesterday's creativity" acquires the character of a delusion. However, obvious changes are taking place within the narrative. It becomes more emotional and slightly confused. There are notes of irrationalism and anxiety. Pastoral carelessness sometimes gives way to reflection and growing drama.

About the artist

— Mikhail Rashkovetsky, art critic

Exhibitions