Biography
Roman Vasylovych Zhuk (born April 11, 1955, Ostrynia village, Ivano-Frankivsk region) — painter.
1978 – Graduated from the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts; instructors: Yuriy Dvornik, Karlo Zvirynskyi.
1978–1982 – Worked as a lecturer at the Department of Painting, Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts.
1987 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Since then, participant in national and international exhibitions. Solo exhibitions in Lviv (1989, 1996), The Hague, Netherlands (1991–1992), Amsterdam, Netherlands (1992–1993), Kyiv (2006, 2009, 2020), and Odesa (2021).
1988, 1989, 1991 – Participant in youth plein-air workshops in Sedniv under the leadership of Tiberiy Silvashi and Oleksandr Soloviov.
Since 1991 – Lives and works in Lviv and Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Roman Zhuk stood at the origins of contemporary Ukrainian art in the late 1980s. “The artist began to form during the final agony of the first conceptual modernism, during the emergence of anti-transcendentalist postmodernism, and today works in the era of metamodernism. Like every true artist, he lives in solitude with himself and the transcendent. In the artistic context, Roman Zhuk’s work is metamodernism in all its dimensions and manifestations after modernism and postmodernism. It is precisely thanks to the archaism embedded in him back somewhere in Kolomyia that he managed to bypass the reefs of cold, almost terrifying postmodernism, and, grabbing the lifebuoy of a warmer, more humanized transmodernism, land on the hitherto unexplored shores of metamodernism” (Taras Voznyak).
Through contemplation into form, texture, and color, the artist conveys the idea of the work, reveals its essence, and returns us to historical mythologems and deep inner archaism, which immerses us into the abyss of a thousand-year-old European culture. The artist presents serious matters with light irony, transforms kitsch into art, combines simplicity with rich color and meaningful narratives, grounds romantic tendencies with grotesque and dark humor, balancing between harmony and holy foolery. His distinctive painting style, formed during the 1990s, is based on the meticulous rendering of the canvas plane and the transformatio
