Biography
Petro Ivanovych Honchar (b. 1949, village of Lypianka, Cherkasy region) is a monumentalist artist, painter, and museum specialist. He is the stepson of Ivan Honchar, an ethnographer and collector.
1972 – Graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute.
1972–1993 – Worked at the Kyiv Monumental and Decorative Art Production Combine.
From 1987 – Participated in art exhibitions.
1988 – Became a member of the Pohliad [View] creative association (Kyiv).
1992 – Became a member of the “Saint Alipius Brotherhood” creative association (Kyiv).
1992 – Became a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
From 1993 – Director of the Ivan Honchar National Centre of Folk Culture, Kyiv.
2000 – Graduated from the Kyiv University of Culture and Arts.
2009 – Honored Artist of Ukraine.
2018 – Laureate of the Mykhailo Sikorsky Prize of the National Union of Local Historians of Ukraine.
Lives and works in Kyiv.
Petro Honchar’s oeuvre is rooted in the principles of Mykhailo Boichuk’s school and the work of Ivan-Valentyn Zadorozhnyi, characterized by their love for the Byzantine tradition (two-dimensionality, clarity of lines, generalized and symbolic imagery, monumentality, and an ascetic palette), as well as the worldview forms of naive painting. Honchar does not merely reproduce the daily life of an ordinary person in a formal way; rather, he seeks to symbolically embody the eternal laws of existence. The subjects of the artist’s paintings are filled with inner harmony and tranquility. They are simple, truthful, sincere, and strikingly lyrical. These sensations are enhanced by a transparent and luminous color palette that seems to glow with a special inner light.
The artist recalls how he discovered the recipe for achieving this transparency of the color palette: “I was once painting a portrait of my daughter, and then I washed it off. And I saw that a beautiful, semi-transparent texture remained. This was precisely what I needed—to achieve spatial depth while preserving two-dimensionality! I can spend a long time with pleasure rubbing the background made of tempera with added egg yolk on gesso. I like to lay down background highlights, seemingly effortlessly, depending on the shape of neighboring highlights, and then admire the result, achieved almost independently of me. I cannot say the same about my composition: sometimes it is merely a pretext for a direct play with texture and, through it, with the space created by the situation itself,” Petro Honchar states.
