Biography
Oleksandr Anatoliyovych Hnylytskyi (1961, Kharkiv – 2009, Kyiv) was a painter, graphic artist, multidisciplinary artist, and a pioneer of Ukrainian video art.
1980 – Graduated from the Kharkiv State Art College, Department of Theater Decoration Painting.
1981–1988 – Studied at the Department of Monumental Painting of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts under Yuriy Chekaniuk and Mykola Storozhenko. Active participant in regional, national, and international exhibitions ever since.
From the 1980s – Engaged in installation and video art.
Early 1990s – Active participant in the Kyiv art squat Paris Commune [Parkommuna].
1996 – Co-founded the Institution of Unstable Thoughts, an interdisciplinary cultural organization and artistic collective, together with the artist Lesia Zaiats, mastering media forms then new to Ukrainian art: video, installation, and performance.
2007 – Represented Ukraine at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
In his final years, lived and worked in Kyiv and Munich as a set designer for television and cinema, as well as an animation artist.
Lived and worked in Kyiv and Munich (Germany).
A member of the Kyiv art squat Paris Commune, Hnylytskyi as a painter operated within the aesthetics of Transavantgarde and Hyperrealism. Throughout his creative path, in addition to painting, the artist turned to a wide variety of mediums, genres, and techniques. “He absorbed such multi-directional and equally painful, often traumatizing energies, transforming and transfiguring them into meditative, highly delicate, and intimate works” (Olesia Avramenko). During his Transavantgarde period, his painterly style underwent several transformations: the “curly style,” green “wave painting,” black-and-white grisaille, and “children’s discourse.”
“The magic of light and shadow fascinated, enchanted, and revealed itself to him. The refraction of light in mirrors and mirrored objects seemed to open up the world in a fuller dimension to him, and everywhere he found himself. His ‘encounter’ and collaboration with video and media were by no means a strained desire to stay ‘in the mainstream,’ as was the case with some of his colleagues; he himself created the channel for his own creative flow. Ultimately, no technique, no digital technology had the power to take the brush from his hands or push him away from the canvas. The very experience of working with new technologies turned into a tool primarily for painterly expression,” writes Olesia Avramenko.
