Our museum continues the “Cheers!” project, which was launched last year and is dedicated to artists whose works are kept in our collection. The KhRAM collection is a unique and integral part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Its research, preservation and popularization is our strategically important mission, especially in times of war for our freedom and identity.

“Andrii has always been drawn to Ukrainian history, its prominent figures and giants of our culture. He is the author of monuments to our writers, he has numerous watercolors of many churches and monasteries. Traveling all over Ukraine, he will not miss any of those ancient buildings, capturing the architectural ensemble, focusing on its defining features. Nimenko has a whole collection of small, modest churches that miraculously survived in the midst of the rampant atheistic obscurantism of our era, which was intolerant of any religion except Marxism.” Mykhailo Marianivskyi, historian (April 1991).

“Andrii Nimenko is one of those artists who are not satisfied with one narrow field of creativity. He is a master who successfully combines his work in graphics and in various genres of sculpture: monumental plastics, portraiture, composition, minting, medallion making. In addition, the artist’s life was so that he closely connected his work with literature. That is why in all genres of his sculpture we see a strong and stable unity with literature.” Oleksandr Fedoruk, art critic.

One of his favorite genres, to which the artist has devoted three decades of hard work, is the sculptural portrait. In his gallery, there are images of writers, composers, artists, as well as simple but strong-minded people with an unshakable will. With the help of plastic techniques, the artist not only reproduces the portrait likeness of the model, but also the character and inner world of the model.

The sculptural portrait of Hryhir Tiutiunnyk dates from 1985. It can be assumed that Nimenko and Tiutiunnyk knew each other personally. After all, both were writers, both belonged to a cohort of progressive intellectuals with a pro-Ukrainian civic position. But why did the portrait appear only five years after the writer’s death? Apparently, it took time to rethink the life and work of Hryhir Tiutiunnyk, to comprehend the depths of his personality. We are looking at a concentrated, immersed in heavy reflections, determined, uncompromising, strong-willed, handsome man. The artist demonstrates a high culture of modeling technique. Despite the fact that the work is made of organic glass, the artist reproduces the texture of metal not only by tinting, but also by modeling techniques. One has to have a great skill to create a psychological portrait of a person so accurately using the language of plastic, to reflect his or her emotional state. The artist, writer, and art critic Andrii Nimenko undoubtedly succeeded in this task.

REFERENCES:

Andrii Nimenko (June 20, 1925, Inhulo-Kamianka village, Kirovohrad region – February 1, 2006, Kyiv) was a sculptor, graphic artist, art critic, and poet. Father of the artist Maksym Nimenko. Candidate of Arts (1955). Honored Artist of the Georgian SSR (1969). Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (1957) and the National Union of Writers of Ukraine (1978). Participant of the Second World War, received combat awards.
1951 – Graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute, Department of Sculpture (teachers Max Helman, Mykhailo Lysenko). Since 1963, he participated in art exhibitions; 1964 – a personal exhibition in Kyiv. On April 20, 1966, together with 9 members of the Ukrainian Artists’ Union, he appealed to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR with a petition in defense of the artist Opanas Zalyvakha.
1953-1971 – Senior Researcher at the Department of Fine Arts of the Maksym Rylskyi Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; 1971-1976 – Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theory and Practice of Cultural and Educational Work of the Kyiv Institute of Culture.
He is the author of art historical studies on the development of Ukrainian sculpture, including the monograph “Ukrainian Soviet Sculpture” (1960), “Ukrainian Sculpture of the Second Half of the 19th – Early 20th Centuries” (1963), and chapters to the multi-volume History of Ukrainian Art (1968, 1970). Author of collections of poetry, including “Over the Plai’s Plai” (1969), “Buzko-Zabutko” (1974), “Mosaic of Windows” (1983), “Forest Fantasies” (1991) (Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine).

Olena Zenich (August 3, 1956, Kyiv – August 7, 2021, Kyiv)
Graduated from the Art and Industrial College, Graphic Department of the Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute, Kyiv Department.
Participation in exhibitions:
1984-1989 – annual republican exhibition of illustration and book design “Artist and Book”, Kyiv;
1991 – exhibition of Ukrainian graphics, Turin, Italy;
1995 – international fair of children’s books “Bologna’95”, Bologna, Italy;
1996 – international exhibition of illustration, Osaka, Japan;
2002 – retrospective personal memorial exhibition “Girl with a Unicorn”, Khmelnytskyi, HOHM.
In the 1980s and 2000s, she collaborated with publishing houses and magazines, including Osvita, Veselka, Dnipro, Ranok, and Barvinok.
1979-1982 – worked as an artist at the Ukrainamovie studio (Kyiv).
“Her painting was a real alchemy with many hours of jewelry processing of every square centimeter of the artistic plane. Just like Grabowski’s seamstress, “from early morning until late at night”. She boldly used incredible techniques, which she often invented herself, using, for example, eggshells or fine sand from the Dnipro River.” Varel Lozovyi, artist and writer.

Hryhir Tiutiunnyk (December 5, 1931, Shylivka village, Poltava region – March 6, 1980, Kyiv) was a Ukrainian writer, translator, teacher, and a Sixties activist. His father, Mykhailo, was repressed in 1937; he was posthumously rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti. The writer’s brother, Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk (1920-1961), won the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for his novel The Whirlpool (1963, posthumously).
In 1946, Hryhir was trained as a locksmith and worked at the Kharkiv Malyshev Plant, but fell ill and returned to Poltava region. For not working the required 3 years, he served 4 months in a penal colony. Later, he went to Donbas, where he worked on a collective farm, in the reconstruction of mines, as a mechanic, and as a turner in a railroad car depot.
In 1957-1962, he studied at the Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University, Faculty of Philology. 1961 – first publication: the Russian-language short story “At Dusk” in the magazine “Krestyanka”; subsequent works were written in Ukrainian.
1963 – moved to Kyiv, worked in the editorial office of the newspaper Literary Ukraine, in the scriptwriting workshop of the Kyiv Dovzhenko Film Studio (together with Dmytro Pavlychko and Ivan Drach created a script for the novel by his brother Hryhoriy Tiutiunnyk, The Whirlpool), and in the Moloda and Veselka publishing houses. Since 1966, he has been a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine. However, Tyutyunnyk’s works were reluctant to be published, and each new work was mercilessly criticized.
1989 – Winner of the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for “Works” in two volumes (posthumously).
“Both in his works and in his life, Hryhir Tiutiunnyk was uncompromising, which came into sharp conflict with the ‘Soviet reality: Tiutiunnyk was repeatedly threatened with expulsion from the Union, dismissal from his job, forcibly invited to various union and party meetings and “educated” there, and openly followed by the KGB. In 1974, he was blacklisted by all publishing houses. His name was banned from any publications, his works were subjected to very strict censorship, and the author himself had a hard time with it. Once he said with pain: “I wrote only the half-truth of life, and I am thrown out of literature. And if I had written the whole truth, would they kill me?”
In 1980, the situation seemed to change: Hryhir Tiutiunnyk was awarded the Lesia Ukrainka Prize for his novels Klymko and Fire Far in the Steppe. However, it was not possible to “tame” the writer: on the night of March 5-6, 1980, Hryhir Tiutiunnyk committed suicide. The writer was clutching a suicide note in his hand: “Tame someone else, and burn what I have.” (Ukrainian Institute of National Memory).