Biography
Yevhen Yakovych Hordiievets (born 1952, Makiivka, Donetsk Region) is a painter.
1967 — At the age of fifteen, he entered the Taras Shevchenko Republican Art School in Kyiv.
1971–1977 — Studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute under the mentorship of Oleksandr Lopukhov. Since then, he has been a participant in regional, national, and international exhibitions, with solo exhibitions held in Paris (France), New York, Scottsdale, and Nantucket (USA).
1977 — First Prize for his diploma work at the All-Union Diploma Exhibition in Vilnius.
1978–1982 — Creative Workshops of the Academy of Arts of the USSR in Kyiv (headed by Serhiy Hryhoriev). Afterward, he worked at the “Khudozhnyk” Creative and Production Association.
1979 — Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1981–1992 — Instructor at the Kyiv State Art Institute.
1982 — First Prize at the Republican Exhibition (Kyiv).
1986 — Honored Artist of Ukraine.
He lived and worked in Kyiv; since 1991, he has lived and worked in the USA.
He creates easel paintings, specifically genre scenes, landscapes, and still lifes. He gravitates toward symbolism, generalization, and the visual rhyming of imagery and narrative lines. The clarity and balance of his compositional structure, as well as his painterly manner, resonate with the heritage of classical European masters, particularly of the Renaissance (14th–16th centuries) and the Golden Age of painting (17th century), especially during Hordiievets’s early creative period. The collection of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum holds four paintings by the artist from this period: Still Life (1982), Night (1984), Crimean Autumn (1985), and Reflection (1988), which were transferred in 1988 by the Directorate of Art Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. Following his emigration to the USA, Hordiievets’s works became characterized by an intensified color palette and fantastical imagery and situations bordering on neosurrealism (“lyrical surrealism”). “A journey in imaginary space”—this is how the artist himself characterizes his art.