For the first three decades of his life, he lived in a foreign country, where he learned Ukrainian on his own. When asked about his nationality, he always answered: “Ukrainian.” Despite his young age, he increasingly thought: “Who am I? What is Ukrainian about me?” These were the questions asked by a true fighter for the freedom of Ukraine, Opanas Ivanovych Zalyvakha (26.11.1925 – 24.04.2007), a painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and ceramist. He was awarded the Vasyl Stus Prize (1989) and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (1995). Honored Artist of Ukraine (1999). He was awarded the Ivan Mazepa Cross, a distinction of the President of Ukraine for his significant contribution to the revival of the national cultural, artistic and spiritual heritage and merits in state-building activities (2010, posthumously).
The family of the future artist, fleeing the famine of the 1930s, moved from Kharkiv region to relatives in the Far East, where Opanas Zalyvakha spent his childhood and youth. From an early age, he had a remarkable talent for drawing, so he studied at the Annunciation Art School (Amur region), then at the art school at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, after which he entered the same institute (1947-1960, he was expelled from the second year “for behavior unworthy of a Soviet student”; later he resumed his studies). In 1957, he did a student internship in Kosovo, where he became interested in the folk art of the Hutsul region. In 1961, Zalyvakha decided to move to Ivano-Frankivsk region. A year later, he organizes a personal exhibition of his works, which the party functionaries did not like because of his “decadent moods,” and in a few days it is closed. His next solo exhibition would take place in Lviv only 26 years later.
In the autumn of 1962, Opanas Zalyvakha met young Kyivan intellectuals and became an active member of the Club of Creative Youth “Sovremennik” (1959-1964) and the human rights movement in Ukraine. In 1964, in collaboration with Alla Horska, Liudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk, and Halyna Zubchenko, he creates the stained-glass window “Shevchenko. The Mother” on the occasion of Taras Shevchenko’s 150th birthday in the lobby of the Red Building of the Kyiv National University. The work was immediately destroyed, and a commission convened afterward qualified it as “ideologically hostile.”
In 1965, Opanas Zalyvakha was arrested and sentenced to 5 years in a strict regime camp on charges of “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation.” He served his sentence in Mordovian camp #11, where he continued to paint in secret. He kept up an active correspondence with like-minded people. In 1970, he returned to Ivano-Frankivsk, married Daryna, Stepan Bandera’s niece, and raised his son Yaroslav and daughter Yaryna.
Opanas Zalyvakha worked in the fields of easel and monumental painting, easel and book graphics, created stained-glass, mosaics, and sculpture. The artist’s innovative works are full of national and patriotic content. In his works, the artist recreates the tragic pages of the history of the Ukrainian people, tells about the sacrifice and courage of the fighters for freedom. As a philosopher, he reflects on the meaning of life, raises the problems of spirituality. A special place in the artist’s work is occupied by Shevchenkiana. The artist’s painting style is characterized by modernist imagery based on the traditions of Ukrainian folk art and boychukism.
Myroslav Aronets (artist, poet, prose writer, art critic): “Opanas Zalyvakha’s life and artistic path is full of drama, constant emotional tension, anxiety and anxiety, and shows that in the boundless Ukrainian space of fine arts there has appeared a purposeful, ambitious, radical author whose convictions are as solid as a stone, and whose colors on the canvas reach the deepest depths of the Ukrainian soul, in particular, in its rebellion. Defending the right to tell the truth about his people, he grew up in the eyes of the Sixties into a great, internally strong fighter for whom the freedom of his people, rejection of slavery were the basis of his being, defined his essence and gave him inspiration to work.”
In history, Opanas Ivanovych Zalyvakha will forever be remembered as a talented artist with an unbreakable nationally conscious position who devoted his life and work to the struggle for freedom and independence of Ukraine.
We are proud that in 1995, our museum hosted a personal exhibition of the artist, at the opening of which he delivered a speech.
The exhibition “Opanas Zalyvakha. Civic Instinct” features works from the collections of the Museum of Arts of Prykarpattia (Ivano-Frankivsk) and the family of Opanas Zalyvakha.
