Biography
Roman Vasylovych Zhuk (born April 11, 1955, Ostrynia village, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast) is a painter.
1978 – Graduated from the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts; teachers included Yurii Dvornyk and Karlo Zvirynskyi.
1978 – 1982 – Lecturer at the Department of Painting, Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts.
1987 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Since then, a participant in national and international exhibitions. Solo exhibitions held in Lviv (1989, 1996), The Hague, Netherlands (1991–92), Amsterdam, Netherlands (1992–93), Kyiv (2006, 2009, 2020), and Odesa (2021).
Since 1991 – Lives and works in Lviv and Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Roman Zhuk stood at the origins of contemporary Ukrainian art in the late 1980s. His distinctive painterly style, developed throughout the 1990s, rests on a meticulous working of the canvas surface, transforming traditional genres (still life and portraiture) into mysterious narratives seasoned with Surrealism in the vein of René Magritte and Max Ernst. His works are characterized by the juxtaposition of contrasting, saturated colors and hues with passages of local color. His art is one of half-hints, half-glances, half-gestures, and half-angles—an understatedness behind which one must decipher citations, emotions, and context.
“Roman Zhuk traces his artistic formation to the ‘Zvirynskyi School.’ However, for all his respect for the maestro Karlo Zvirynskyi, who indeed set artists on their feet, Zhuk’s path paradoxically lay not in affirming Modernism, but in overcoming it—that is, overcoming Zvirynskyi. Clearly, he succeeded. Despite having passed through the school of the avant-garde—the ‘Sel-skyi / Zvirynskyi School’—Zhuk emerged at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s as an independent, fully Transavantgarde artist,” notes art critic Taras Vozniak.
Having gained widespread acclaim in the late 1980s amidst the wave of interest in Ukrainian Transavantgardism, he participated in the legendary Perestroika-era exhibition Youth of the Country (Molodost Strany) at the Moscow Manege, as well as the Sedniv open-air symposia (plein airs) and Soviet-American/Soviart exhibitions. He had the opportunity to travel to Europe and host exhibitions in Amsterdam, which he later chose as his place of residence. In the land of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Zhuk’s peculiar refinement was warmly received: starting in the early 1990s, he participated in Dutch exhibitions under the designation of “Dutch Magic Realism.”
