Biography
Tiberiy Yosypovych Silvashi (born 1947, Mukachevo, Zakarpattia Oblast) is an abstract painter and art theorist.
1962–1966 – Studied at the Taras Shevchenko Republican Art School in Kyiv.
1966–1972 – Studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute under Tatiana Yablonskaya. Participant in national and international exhibitions since 1971, including nearly 50 solo shows.
1978 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (NUAU).
1978 – Published the Manifesto of Chronorealism, stating that time itself serves as the subject of artistic inquiry in his painting.
1988–1991 – Board member and head of the Youth Section of NUAU; directed creative workshops for young artists in Sednev.
1991–1996 – Founded the artistic group Zhyvopysnyi Zapovidnyk (Paintings Reserve), which included Marko Heyko, Oleksandr Zhyvotkov, Mykola Kryvenko, and Anatoliy Kryvolap.
1995 – Named “Artist of the Year” and awarded a scholarship from the Municipality of Munich, Germany.
2013 – Full Member (Academician) of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
2022 – Laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.
2024 – Recipient of the UP 100 Award, named among Ukraine’s leaders in the “Culture” category.
Lives and works in Kyiv.
Tiberiy Silvashi is recognized as one of the most prominent creative figures in contemporary Ukrainian art. A relentless innovator, the artist frequently experiments with combining diverse painterly mediums and formats, blending cutting-edge post-conceptual strategies and the ideas of “chronorealism” with the traditions of coloristic culture. The primary platform of Zhyvopysnyi Zapovidnyk, the association he established, was “neo-formalism”—a departure from figurative painting in which a picture is presented not as a window onto the world, but as a surface covered with a layer of paint. In doing so, its members operated within the realm of Modernism, focusing on painting per se, color, texture, and spatial form.
Having immersed himself in abstraction, Silvashi became celebrated for his ambition to “expand” the boundaries of the artwork, turning it into an open structure. In many of his projects, viewers can physically experience color in space and what Silvashi calls the “slowing down of time.” As art scholars Kateryna Syta and Kateryna Fokina observe: “Representing an extreme case of analytical abstraction, the artist’s works transform dead and inert matter into a state of light. In most of his canvases, figures and narrative are entirely absent. There is only color as an event. It is the artist’s attempt to purify painting to a state of pure perception.” Silvashi himself remarks: “There are painters who live within the flow of color and ‘listen’ to it. I am one who does not paint, but rather ‘grows’ painting.”
