Biography
Volodymyr Petrovych Kabachenko (1958, Mykolaiv – 2024, Odesa) was a painter, graphic artist, educator, and art historian.
1978 — Graduated from the Grekov Odesa Art College.
1983 — Graduated from the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. From then on, he was a participant in exhibitions in Odesa (1991, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2010), Gdańsk (1993), Kyiv (1994), Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro, 1997), and Mykolaiv (2001).
1988, 1989, 1991 — Participant in the youth plein-air workshops in Sedniv led by Tiberiy Silvashi and Oleksandr Soloviov.
From 1989 — Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
From 1993 — Member of the Board of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1993–1996 — Chairman of the Youth Association of the Odesa Organization of the Union of Artists of Ukraine.
2001–2006 — Chairman of the Board of the Odesa Regional Organization of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
From 2015 — Taught at the Department of Fine Arts of the Faculty of Art and Graphics at K. D. Ushynsky South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University in Odesa; served as a research fellow at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum.
2021 — Honored Artist of Ukraine.
Lived and worked in Odesa.
A representative of the Ukrainian “New Wave”, Kabachenko actively engaged in publicistic writing, art criticism, and civic endeavors alongside his painting. Beginning in the 1980s, the foundation of his stylistic search was a mythological-metaphorical interpretation of folklore motifs. Kabachenko’s work was oriented toward the discourse of Ukrainian spirituality. By the 1990s, he was a fully formed artist with a distinct visual language deeply rooted in folk tradition. His oeuvre organically integrated into a new era of national art. The painterly manner of the artist reflects a profound and thorough inquiry into the history of Ukrainian culture. His artistic imagery embodies a cosmic worldview, closely linked to myth, folk tales, and the future—where tall tales and uncanny transformations are inseparable from a sharp, delicate experience of modernity. The artist’s poetic “non-figurative” art bears traces of constructivist elements in the form of lines and rays that partition the picture plane into distinct color fragments. The symbols employed by the artist prime the viewer for philosophical observation and reflections on the meaning of existence.
