Biography
Borys Ivanovych Buriak (b. 1953, village of Podvirne, Chernivtsi region) is a painter.
1974 – Graduated from the Ivan Trush Lviv College of Applied and Decorative Arts.
1979 – Graduated from the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts.
1979–1981 – Taught at the Ivan Trush Lviv College of Applied and Decorative Arts.
1981–1986 – Lecturer in drawing and painting at the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts.
From 1986 – Participated in exhibitions, dedicated to creative work.
1987 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1987 – One of the founders of the Club of Ukrainian Artists [Klub Ukrainskykh Mystsiv] creative association.
2004 – Honored Artist of Ukraine.
2009 – Full Member of the Academic Senate of the International Academy of Modern Art, Rome, Italy.
2016 – People’s Artist of Ukraine.
Lives and works in Lviv.
“The artist’s journey is emblematic of the Lviv school of the second half of the 20th century. Like most students at the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts, he was fascinated by the Renaissance masters and experienced a profound revelation from Roman Selskyi’s solo exhibitions. He demonstrated an overt interest in the painting of Baltic and Armenian artists and, undoubtedly, in what was officially prohibited and inaccessible—for instance, the oeuvre of Pierre Bonnard and Georges Rouault,” writes art historian Orest Holubets.
The result of the search for his own artistic identity was the birth of an individual painterly language based on a meaningful synthesis of the plastic traditions of Ukrainian painting, modernism, and the achievements of contemporary visual art. The artist experiments extensively with the generalization of form, texture, and color. The thematic range of the artist’s interests is exceptionally broad: urban landscapes, rural life, spirituality, historical events, and landmark figures. In recent years, his rich, impasto, figurative painting has been transforming into abstraction.
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, interest in Ukrainian culture erupted with powerful force. Names of figures who at various periods stood at the forefront of socio-political and cultural events, serving as examples of principledness, unyielding resolve, and steadfast convictions in the struggle for artistic freedom, returned from oblivion. One such figure is Mykhailo Lvoyvch Boichuk (1882–1937), a legendary Ukrainian monumentalist artist, one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, pedagogue, and art historian.
