Biography
Ivan Stepanovych Marchuk (b. 1936, village of Moskalivka, Ternopil region) is a painter, graphic artist, and sculptor.
1956 – Graduated from the Ivan Trush Lviv College of Applied Arts.
1965 – Graduated from the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts.
1988 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1989 – 2001 – Lived in Australia, Canada, and the USA.
1990 – First official exhibition in Kyiv, National Art Museum of Ukraine.
1996 – Honored Artist of Ukraine.
1997 – Laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.
2001 – 2022 – Lived and worked in Kyiv.
2002 – People’s Artist of Ukraine.
From 2022 – Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
The formation of the artist took place under the conditions of a totalitarian state dominated by a single official method approved by the regime of the time—Socialist Realism. Everything that did not fit within its boundaries was persecuted and prohibited. Marchuk recalls: “I came under pressure around 1972, when I first clashed with officials of the political regime at the time. And this lasted for almost 20 years. The first 10 of them were the hardest in my life. For years I lived in daily fear, under a watchful, restless eye—not knowing whether I would go to sleep free or wake up free in the morning.”
Ivan Marchuk created his own recognizable style and unique technique. The artist’s works appear as if woven from threads. Perhaps that is how his father, who was a master weaver renowned throughout Volhynia, once wove with real threads. Maybe pliontanizm was born precisely because that thread stretches all the way from childhood. There is another version as well. According to the memoirs of writer Kostiantyn Rylov, “the artist said that in 1972 he looked at the autumn sky through tree branches and created a technique—now any image appears as if woven from branches and straws. This was a strong move—he invented a visual element from which he built an artistic system.”
Today, the artist’s legacy includes more than 150 solo exhibitions and nearly 5,000 paintings. Landscapes occupy a special place in the artist’s oeuvre. In Marchuk’s work, they are desolate, meditative, poignant, as if frozen in time and space: with low-slung houses, wooden fences, haystacks, earthenware jugs, and wooden tubs. Indeed, with everything that has been close to his heart since childhood, as Ivan Stepanovych was born and raised in a village.
