Information about the work
The exhibited artwork Dreamy Woman [Zamriyana] (oil on cardboard, 1987) was transferred to the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum collection by the Directorate of Artistic Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine in 2000. The half-length depiction of a woman belongs to the Carpathian cycle, as evidenced by her rural attire. One senses that the peasant woman has briefly paused from her household chores and sunk into deep reflection on her life. The expression of her sorrowful face and her closed pose underscore a state of total concentration and immersion in profound thought. The expressive painting technique and compositional structure reference the tradition of European Modernism, which directly influenced the formation of the Lviv school of painting.
In this work, as in all of Honcharuk’s oeuvre, the color palette is deliberately restricted by the artist to three primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—and two achromatic tones (white and black), along with their derivatives. For instance, she does not use premixed greens, choosing instead to blend available pigments directly on the canvas as needed. She paints predominantly with open, pure colors. “Sometime in the 1980s, my works were rejected from an exhibition of Lviv painting. I asked why, and the response was: ‘Because yours is not Lviv painting—it is too bright.’ Yet I feel comfortable with these colors, because their resource is infinite,” the artist recalls.
Art critic Andrii Dorosh, unlike the selection committee representative, believes that Honcharuk’s painting demonstrates a distinct continuity with the traditions of Lviv painting: “Having mastered the decorative manner of painting long inherent to Lviv art, Alla Honcharuk introduced not only elements of the 1960s ‘Severe Style’ into it, but also imbued it with a new humanistic content—a phenomenon not frequently encountered among Lviv artists.”
Cardboard, oil. 80 × 50