Biography
Nina Mykhailivna Denysova (born in 1942, Zlatoust, Chelyabinsk Oblast, russia) – graphic artist, illustrator, painter, monumentalist. Husband – artist Mykola Malyshko.
1961 – graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Art School.
1965 – 1982 – collaborated with the “Veselka” publishing house, Kyiv.
From 1966 – participant in republican and international exhibitions.
1983 – together with Mykola Malyshko and a small group of like-minded villagers from Malyutianka, initiated the restoration of Mykola Pymonenko’s house-workshop damaged by fire.
1985 – member of the Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1987 – participates in one of the first independent exhibition initiatives in Ukraine by the Pohliad creative association of monumentalist artists (curator – Dmytro Nahurnyi) at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute; subsequently, the exhibition gave its name to the informal creative association.
1995 – first personal exhibition (curator – Alla Botanova), the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum, Khmelnytskyi.
2025 – retrospective personal exhibition Painted (curator – Antonina Melnychuk), the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum, Khmelnytskyi.
From 1975 – lives and works in Malyutianka village, Kyiv Oblast, and Kyiv.
The plasticity of images, rhythmics and dynamics of lines, and the dramaturgy of colors in Nina Denysova’s work open up a deep archetypal experience of the world, a sense of the soul as part of the incomprehensible: earthly and cosmic, nature and God. The artist’s work is rooted in the Ukrainian worldview and is its vivid contemporary expression. “In her space between heaven and earth, she is free. Her painting is of a high, noble level, where the sacred is created by minimal means. And we gaze, observe, and analyze a painting doomed to an endless future. Painting oriented toward Eternity.” (Alla Marychevska).
The Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum researcher Antonina Melnychuk writes: “At the end of the 1980s, when rapid changes were taking place in the country, the Denysova-Malyshko family finally got a long-awaited workshop on Andriivskyi Uzviz. It is from here that we can count the beginning of Nina Denysova’s formation as a painter. At this time, new art centers emerge. In 1992, the ‘Brotherhood of Venerable Alypius’ arises (which, besides Nina Denysova and Mykola Malyshko, also included Petro Honchar, Petro Malyshko, Oleksandr Melnyk, Volodymyr Fedko, and Vasyl Khymochka). The artists did not proclaim a manifesto, but at that time they were all united by a deep connection with the pictorial traditions of the Ukrainian people, particularly with the Boychukists repressed in the 1930s, and the coloristic experience of the previously banned European modernist art.”
In the work Inexpressible [Nevymovne] (canvas, tempera, 1991, acquired for the KhRAM collection from the author in 1993), Nina Denysova delves into the issue of memory. The artist actively experiments with form: “Space began to play one of the key roles in the works. Lyricism, melody, and plasticity appeared in them,” she, according to Antonina Melnychuk, “tries to conquer space-time and go beyond the boundaries of the conscious,” continuing to nurture her “inner child.”
“Pivotal works in the artist’s oeuvre became Gaze Within (canvas, tempera, 1990, the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum collection), Inexpressible (canvas, tempera, 1991, the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum collection), Evening Approaches (canvas, tempera, 1992, the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum collection), in which the painter turns to the theme of childhood as the foundation for the formation of human personality. Childhood memories appear not as an autobiographical plot, but as a space of primary emotional experience in which the integrity of worldview, sincerity, and immediacy of experience are still preserved. It is through their metaphorical comprehension that Denysova increasingly asserts her individual artistic language. […] In the works, different temporal dimensions begin to coexist within a single canvas, forming a multilayered structure of the artistic image. Turning to the principle of simultaneity enables the artist to overcome the linear perception of time: past, present, and future no longer unfold sequentially, but interact as equal components of a single imagery space.” (Antonina Melnychuk).
